God Is Eternally Giving Away God

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation
Grace: Week 1

National September 11 South pool, New York, New York, April 2012. Photograph by NormanB.

Monday, January 25, 2016 – (Feast of St. Paul, the Apostle of Grace)

It is by grace that you are saved, through faith, not by anything of your own, but by a pure gift from God, and not by anything you have achieved. Nobody can claim the credit. You are God’s work of art. –Ephesians 2:8

By grace you notice, nothing to do with good deeds, or grace would not be grace at all. –Romans 11:6

Happy are those servants whom the master finds awake. I tell you he will put on an apron, sit them down at table, and wait on them. –Luke 12:37

I think grace, arising from God’s limitless love, is the central theme of the entire Bible. It is the divine Unmerited Generosity that is everywhere available, totally given, usually undetected as such, and often even undesired. This grace was defined even in the old Baltimore Catechism as “that which confers on our souls a new life, that is, a sharing in the life of God himself [sic].” [1] We always knew it on paper, but much less in experience and conviction.

In the parable of the watchful servants (Luke 12:35-40), God is actually presented as waiting on us–in the middle of the night! In fact, we see God as both our personal servant inside our house and the divine burglar who has to “break through the walls of [our] house.” That’s really quite extraordinary and not our usual image of God. It shows how much God–the “Hound of Heaven,” as Francis Thompson says–wants to get to us and how unrelenting is the work of grace.

Unless and until you understand the biblical concept of God’s unmerited favor, God’s unaccountable love, most of the biblical text cannot be interpreted or tied together in any positive way. It is, without doubt, the key and the code to everything transformative in the Bible. People who have not experienced the radical character of grace will always misinterpret the meanings and major direction of the Bible. The Bible will become a burden, obligation, and weapon more than a gift.

Grace cannot be understood by any ledger of merits and demerits. It cannot be held to patterns of buying, losing, earning, achieving, or manipulating, which is where, unfortunately, most of us live our lives. Grace is, quite literally, “for the taking.” It is God eternally giving away God–for nothing–except the giving itself. I believe grace is the life energy that makes flowers bloom, animals lovingly raise their young, babies smile, and the planets remain in their orbits–for no good reason whatsoever–except love alone.

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Gateway to Silence
Open me to grace upon grace upon grace.

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References:
[1] The New Baltimore Catechism of yesteryear; the more recent catechisms say essentially the same thing.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2007), 155-156.

 

Inner Child makes the Flying Leap!

This will be a very simple, fairly short, post. A few days ago I posted “How to be Great!”  challenging all of us, Gentle Reader, to increase our awareness of the Intimate and Immediate Presence of God through developing (or rediscovering) simple childlike trust, and applying that to Our Father.

I phrased this thought in a comment below the post, thus:

“[Our Father] has LOTS of children! …  It goes on and on and on. All it takes to enjoy that play… those warm strong arms and hands… is a brisk sprint and the flying leap in His direction, trusting that He catch you. He ALWAYS does. He ALWAYS has. He ALWAYS will.”

Our Father delights in children. I’ve said before that the single unrelenting truth I see repeated throughout the Bible from one end to the other, is the ongoing saga of God seeking to live intimately among His children… to provide for us, care for us, protect us, love us… and our equally unrelenting determination to resist or eventually sabotage His efforts.

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But here’s a critical thing I neglected to mention in the challenge to Trust…

In order to know that experience… of being caught and cherished in Our Father’s strong warm arms and hands… we MUST first make that flying leap of faith.

What’s worse… Only our Inner Child can do that!

Think about it. How likely are you, or me, or anyone else… to get a sprinting running start, and then leap out into empty space? How silly do/would we feel? Ever gone to one of those… (I’ve thought of several adjectives to insert right here, but I’m resisting the impulse)... “Teamwork Building Workshops” in management or an organization? You know… the ones with the obstacle course, the ropes course, the puzzles to work out? The ones where you do the “Trust Fall” and let yourself Nestea-Plunge backwards in the hope that your colleagues and teammates will catch you, preventing a heart-stopping diaphragm-paralyzing fall that puts you in traction for a week? Ever been there? So… how silly does all that feel?

You have to “change gears” to get into all that. You have to “shift into Game-Mode”. Remember the folks who seemed to be having a great time, and did pretty well? Then, remember the grumps who just stood off to the side, arms crossed, shaking their heads at all this “waste-of-time-foolishness”?

What’s the difference between those two groups?

The first have discovered and liberated their Inner Child. The second, have him/her locked in their room for the duration (of life).

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So what has any of this got to do with Prayer, with the Bible, with Jesus, Little Monk?

Just this… does God love us any less when we grieve and confine our Inner Child? No. He loves us just the same.

Is there anything “wrong” with behaving like a mature, sensible adult in our lives? No, of course not… that’s why we bother to grow up at all!

Then what are you talking about?

Our upbringings… our parents, mentors, teachers, school, religion… teach us “Da Rules” to constrain and conform our Inner Child to adult norms of behavior. (That is a GOOD thing. Inner Child, left to his/her own devices can become a selfish little monster.) Inner Child is that essence of the “self alone”, of “me”, of “my”, without much regard for others except as they bring us comfort or pleasure. Our “Inner Parent” is the authority, the Rulegiver, the programming we carry with us telling us all the objective standards for right, wrong, acceptable, unacceptable, and what makes us OK or not.

As we grow and develop, these interactions go along, and we become the “Inner Adult”… the personal voice of judgment, reason, consideration, and decision-making on what we do, what priorities we set, what values we adopt, and how we choose to live.

Sooo… this leads into Jesus… how, exactly?

Just this. We can become utterly addicted to our Inner Adult. We can, gradually, surreptitiously, become convinced that our own judgment… our own thinking… our own reason… is the only trustworthy criterion we have for choosing lifestyle. And, to be perfectly frank… Jesus “won’t fit” inside that paradigm at all.

Jesus can certainly “work with” it. We can “believe” in Him with our head. And we can “confess Him” with our mouth. And thus… assuredly… we can be “saved”.

Is that enough?

Yes. Yes it is. That “saves… from the pains of the second death and fires of hell”. We can say all the Roman Road “magic words”… confess our sins, ask Him into our hearts and lives, declare our willingness to be His, and He is EVER and ALWAYS faithful to take that offer, redeem us, and declare us His forever. Yes.

At that point… at that moment… we are “safe forever” from the Father’s Wrath and Punishment Due Our Sin! Yes.

But again, I ask… Is that enough? Is that enough for you? Was it enough for me?

It was not. I want/wanted more. I want/wanted all God has/had/will ever have for me. I want to love God with ALL my heart, mind, strength… to love as Jesus loves… I want so much MORE than “enough”.

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And then one day, God answered the “desire of my heart”. He issued a challenge, I responded, and everything changed. I’m not going to tell you “how that went down” for me, because such words create an expectation that that’s how it “should go down” for anyone or everyone else, and that’s just not true. HOW such things progress is individual… as the Holy Spirit ushers one’s own soul along the right path.

But here was the challenge…

“Only one’s Inner Child can make the leap of faith… the Trust… that you crave, Little Monk. Put aside, for the moment, all that you know… all that you think… all that maturity and training you’ve worked to endure… embrace your Inner Child, and give that permission to leap… unrestrained… into the Void calling My Name. I shall catch you… every single time. There is nothing to fear.”

[NOTE: Please bear in mind, Gentle Reader… though this should go without saying… I speak here of a Prayer Event… a metaphorical leap. This is an experience of meditation and prayer. This has nothing to do with children’s tying a towel around their necks, and plunging off the garage eaves! Please step off no roofs, climb from no boats in deep water expecting to walk ashore… None of that, to be taken from this post!]

There is nothing WRONG with our Inner Adult. But he/she is “limited” by the horizons and boundaries of our own minds and hearts. Only when we embrace and accept our own Inner Child… allowing him/her access to our prayer lives, will we discover the trusting Leap of Faith.

I am reminded of an instruction oft-repeated to me years ago, long before I came to understand it…

“Please stop trying so hard to be Jesus. Only Jesus can be Jesus. Instead, just try to LET Jesus be Jesus IN you, because only He can.”

Jesus never lost His embrace of His Inner Child. His Inner Child always knew the Joy and Love of Our Father!

Now, Gentle Reader… go “play” for a bit!

 

Where Do We Live… Really?

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice! Let your gentle spirit be known to all men. The Lord is near. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. [Philippians 4:4-9]

Christians are (or should be) in the “Rejoicing Business”. Our task is to share the Gospel, the Good News of hope, loving one another unconditionally. Paul encourages us to joy. He addresses aloneness first, assuring us that the Lord is near. He addresses our fear and anxiety next, commending us to make our requests with prayer, supplication and thanks. Once we do so, he assures us, the incomprehensible peace of God will guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus.

Isn’t that amazing? What a simple instruction… don’t be anxious but in everything, offer up prayer with thanks… and peace will guard our hearts and minds.

Then Paul follows up this incredible promise with a more specific instruction, that we dwell on excellent and praiseworthy things. That we are to practice what we’ve learned from Paul, focus on the good and excellent, and thus the God of peace will be with us.

This rings deep with me for two reasons, and has suggested a question to me. I thought I’d share the question, and see what you think.

Most of my ministry is counseling. People come to see me when they lack joy in unbearable ways. That is the first reason this rang in me. I realize a strange thing. The people I see, people who hurt, are not generally “hurting in the present”. That is, they are not hurting from things of the “here and now”. The pain they feel comes from ideas they dwell upon. Usually, these are either memories of the past, or fears of the future. Whether divorce, family troubles, business failures, all ghosts from the past. Then there are the anxieties of the future… job worries, children, financial strains, all fears of future misfortunes. OR, even if the concerns are of the present, they are often based on people and decisions that are not HERE. People and decisions made by others elsewhere, about which we can do nothing.

Here’s the question… How much of our time, do we actually spend dwelling on the here and now, where God and grace are accessible to us? And how much do we spend either in regrets of the past, fears of the future, or stressing on things well beyond our ability to affect?

Here’s an amazing thing I’ve realized. “Joyful people” live mostly in the here and now, and focus on excellent and good things. Miserable people, do not.

The second point that made this so ring for me was actually a bit funny. This blog is the “Postmodern Mystic”, and much of my focus is meditation, contemplation, mental prayer. I get lots of questions about what these mean, what IS this, when I speak on it… people are curious, sometimes hungry, to engage in prayer of this sort. It is easy enough to “describe” or “define”, but not so easy to help people understand.

But I realized that this little Philippians passage is a wonderful description. I’ve admitted from time to time my challenge with “cat-herding”. My mind sometimes bounds from one topic to another in a rather “out of the box” stream of consciousness that usually links up to a general theme, without necessarily making sense in a chain-link fashion.

Bottom Line: When one follows Paul’s instruction here, God fulfills His promise. When/if one chooses to “dwell” upon the excellent, lovely, and good… then the Excellent/Lovely/Good “dwells back” and the mind/heart is not only guarded, but experiences joy and peace. These tend to be addictive on their own, and reinforce the practice. “Meditation/Contemplation” may well BEGIN as an effort and a discipline… but with just a bit of perseverance, they become joyful, attractive, peaceful and… well, frankly… habit-forming.

What do you think, Gentle Reader?

 

Mysticism, Spirituality, and Sanity

This is a super quick note about “inspiration”, or the experience of any expression of immediate relationship with the Divine.

When anyone speaks of “private revelation” (something God has revealed to an individual personally), most listeners become uncomfortable. There are lots of reasons for this, not the least of which is how easy it is to mistake “delusion” for “illumination”.

To create rituals around immediate interface with God, religious practice, makes such encounters less disturbing. The free movements of an unrestrained  mob can be chaotic and frightening. People lined up neatly and organized in rows and columns, walking quietly in step and standard directions, can be comforting because they are more predictable.

Let us presume that the Holy Spirit desires, intends, and constantly works to bring a Christian to immediate experience of the presence, the love, and the communion of/with God. Further, let’s posit that a part of that communion, a fruit of that encounter, will be the urge to gather together for mutual encouragement and urging to love and works of grace. If this is so, then Church (as intended by the Spirit), results from the interior action of grace and inspiration of the Spirit. Church, thus, becomes far more an effect of closeness with God, rather than a cause.

Now, as a mental health professional of many years, I cannot express the ease with which delusions of various sorts… power, grandeur, messianic… and far more distasteful… can be intertwined with religion and spiritual concepts. Everything from the occult to radical cults… involve mental health delusions wrapped in religious trappings and claims of divine contact and inspiration. Some such claims are sincere, and part of the fantasy architecture of the sufferer. Others are habitual cloaking, masking simple sociopathy and power games, by exploiting the authoritarian structures of biblical language (usually predominantly Old Testament), to manage victims through guilt, shame, and misplaced piety.

Horrible acts of unspeakable cruelty and madness have been perpetrated by the insane, while invoking “personal revelation” as granting the authority and power of God over the wills and freedom of others.

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So… how do we… how do Christians… reconcile these concerns?

How do we remain open to intimate and immediate presence and dialogue with God through His Spirit proclaimed to speak to and teach us all we need to know… without risking delusion, misdirection, rupture of our boundaries of sanity? I mean, is every “interior voice” the voice of God?

No, we have the ability to hear many interior voices. There may be a voice to the Holy Spirit, but also inspiration of darkness, voice of memory, imagination of possibilities and internal argumentation of logic… Depending on how verbal we are in personality, we may have entire dialogues going on.

We are to “test the spirits”…

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world. You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore they speak as from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God; he who knows God listens to us; he who is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. [1 John 4:1-6]

Our caution is based on the (appropriate) fear of being misled, deluded, by a spirit of error, of falsehood, of the world, of the antichrist. But John counsels us to courage, to wisdom, and discernment. He does not say to close off and ignore “prayer of locution” (the technical name for hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit), but that we learn to distinguish inspiration of God from other possibilities.

Here are some principles that can help one be confident in discernment and secure in grace and sanity.

• The counsels of 1 Corinthians 13 all hold true for inspiration of the Holy Spirit. God never counsels contrary to His nature.
• Prompting of holy inspiration glorifies God, exalts God, and humbles the self. When God inspires, you will not feel “puffed up” in the experience, but rather awestruck with wonder and amazement at His kindness and the grace of it all.
• Prompting of holy inspiration fosters love and charity towards others, and a sense of (for lack of a better term) “heart of Christmas giving, rather than receiving” towards others. There is a sense of “communion” and “caritas… charity… towards others”, rather than any sense of entitlement.
• Holy inspiration, spoken from the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, is always reflected in the walk and ministry of Christ as revealed in the Gospels. If an inspiration is not consistent with what Jesus does, did, or would do or say… it lacks consistency with Jesus, and is best dismissed.
• There is a sense of authority and recognition to the inspiration. As Jesus said “I know My sheep and they know Me, and they hear My voice.” There is a sense of affirmation of spirit to direction of the Holy Spirit.

So, three questions to “test the spirits”…

• Does the inspiration glorify God, or me? Does it appeal to my ego and leave me puffed up? Or does it give life more abundant to others?
• Is the inspiration consistent with Jesus of the Gospels? His words? His walk?
• Does the Spirit within me grant a sense of affirmation that this urging is of Him?

If any of those are missing, it may not mean that the inspiration is not of God, but it does mean that we are not yet attuned enough to its truth to act upon it.

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And here I will close. Lots more could be said, but I really just wanted to address that Christians can be so hesitant in “listening to Him” because of a healthy caution about delusion. We can trust Him. When we seek Him, determined to obey Him but not the enemy… He honors this, and will grant clarity.

Discussion more than welcome… Grace to thee, Gentle Reader! — The Little Monk

 

Remember: Compassion

Image: The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix) by Vincent Van Gogh, 1890

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation Compassion Sabbath Meditation Saturday, July 5, 2014

Remember: Compassion The True Self does not teach us compassion as much as it IS compassion already. (Sunday) Only after God has taught us how to live “undefended” can we immediately stand with and for the other. (Monday) The gaze of compassion, looking out at life from the place of Divine Intimacy, is really all I have, and all I have to give. (Tuesday) True prayer or contemplation is a leap into commonality and community. (Wednesday) Compassion and patience are the absolutely unique characteristics of true spiritual authority. (Thursday) The compassionate holding of seeming meaninglessness or tragedy, as Jesus does in hanging on the cross, is the final and triumphant resolution of all dualisms and dichotomies. (Friday) Rest: Tonglen Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön, shares the practice of tonglen as a way of holding suffering and awakening compassion: “In order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves. “In particular, to care about other people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean—you name it—to have compassion and to care for these people, means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves . . . . Instead of fending it off and hiding from it, one could open one’s heart and allow oneself to feel that pain, feel it as something that will soften and purify us and make us far more loving and kind. “The tonglen practice is a method for connecting with suffering—ours and that which is all around us—everywhere we go. It is a method for overcoming fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our heart. Primarily it is a method for awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us, no matter how cruel or cold we might seem to be. “We begin the practice by taking on the suffering of a person we know to be hurting and who we wish to help. For instance, if you know of a child who is being hurt, you breathe in the wish to take away all the pain and fear of that child. Then, as you breathe out, you send the child happiness, joy, or whatever would relieve their pain. This is the core of the practice: breathing in others’ pain so they can be well and have more space to relax and open, and breathing out, sending them relaxation or whatever you feel would bring them relief and happiness. However, we often cannot do this practice because we come face to face with our own fear, our own resistance, anger, or whatever our personal pain, our personal stuckness, happens to be at that moment. “At that point you can change the focus and begin to do tonglen for what you are feeling and for millions of others just like you who at that very moment of time are feeling exactly the same stuckness and misery. Maybe you are able to name your pain. You recognize it clearly as terror or revulsion or anger or wanting to get revenge. So you breathe in for all the people who are caught with that same emotion and you send out relief or whatever opens up the space for yourself and all those countless others. Maybe you can’t name what you’re feeling. But you can feel it—a tightness in the stomach, a heavy darkness, or whatever. Just contact what you are feeling and breathe in, take it in—for all of us and send out relief to all of us. “. . . [You] can do tonglen for all the people who are just like you, for everyone who wishes to be compassionate but instead is afraid, for everyone who wishes to be brave but instead is a coward. . . . “Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us. “Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.” Adapted from “The Practice of Tonglen” by Pema Chödrön, Shambhala.org Gateway to Silence: May I see with eyes of compassion. For further study: Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi “Gospel Call for Compassionate Action (Bias from the Bottom),” CAC Foundation Set (CD, MP3 download) Journey of Faith: Making One of Two (MP3 download) Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation

 

The False Self

Richard Rohrer’s Meditations: The False Self Your False Self is your necessary warm-up act, the ego part of you that establishes your separate identity, especially in the first half of life. (Sunday) Your False Self is what changes, passes, and dies when you die. Only your True Self lives forever. (Monday) Your False Self is who you think you are. Your thinking does not make it true. (Tuesday) Thomas Merton rightly recognized that it was not the body that had to “die” but the “false self” that we do not need anyway, precisely because it is only a part of us, but trying to pass for the Whole. (Wednesday) All mature religion must and will talk about the death of any notion of a separate, and therefore false, self. (Thursday) Most souls are initially “unsaved” in the sense that they cannot dare to imagine they could be one with God/Reality/the universe. This is the lie of the False Self that dies slowly. (Friday) Rest: Drawing Empty Space It’s difficult to see what is not manifest, what is intangible and yet the most objective of all reality. Yet we can learn to see differently, to be present to Being. This simple practice shifts our usual way of literal seeing and invites an inner change in how we see ourselves, the world, and the Divine. Sitting at a table or desk with a pencil and a piece of blank, unlined paper, look at a nearby object. Turn your attention to the empty or “negative” space surrounding the object. Rather than focus on the object’s contours, look at the lines and curves of the space butting up against the object, the places in between and around the object itself. Breathe deeply and begin to draw these nooks and crannies of air and emptiness. Keep your focus on the negative space as you draw. You might draw all of the spaces around the object or spend just a few moments drawing. When your pencil comes to a stop, observe the form and detail of the “nothingness” you’ve drawn. Know that your True Self, though perhaps less visible than ego and persona, is spacious and objective. Let your inner witness quietly observe the “negative space” within yourself. Rest in this abundant emptiness, full of Presence. For further study: Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (book) True Self/False Self (CD) Gateway to Silence: I am who I am in the eyes of God— nothing more and nothing less.

 

Knowing Who You Are

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation The First Half of Life Knowing Who You Are Tuesday, March 4, 2014 Gentle Reader — These are not my words. I reblog the wisdom of another. BUT, after 35 or so years of counseling, prayer, pondering the human heart, mind, soul… I couldn’t possibly have summarized what I have come to know to be true… as well as these words describe. This, this short and simple disclosure, is True. May it bless you and yours — Little Monk. The first half of life is of crucial importance. You need boundaries, identity, safety, and some degree of order and consistency to get started personally and culturally. (Conservatives are much better here, but the trouble is that they stay here!) You have to have boundaries to move beyond boundaries, without dropping the boundaries! This is paradox. It’s both-and. You have to have a home to which you can return. In other words, you need to know who you are. You also need to feel “special”; you need your “narcissistic fix.” By that I mean we all need some successes, response, and positive feedback early in life, or we will spend the rest of our lives demanding it, or bemoaning the lack of it, from others. There is a good and needed “narcissism,” if you want to call it that. You have to first have an ego structure to then let go of it and move beyond it. Only people who have internalized some impulse control tend to be successful in life, jobs, and relationships. If you are mirrored well by others early in life you do not have to spend the rest of your life looking in Narcissus’ mirror or begging for the attention of others. You have already been “attended to” and now feel basically good—and always will—and can now attend to others instead of yourself. If you were properly mirrored when you were young, you are now free to mirror others and to see yourself honestly and helpfully. I can see why a number of saints spoke of prayer itself as simply receiving the ever-benevolent gaze of God, returning it in kind, mutually gazing, and finally recognizing that it is one single gaze received and bounced back. And I do believe some people receive this loving gaze from God, even though they never got it from either of their parents. Their longing and their need is so great, and grace is always there to fill the vacuum. Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, pp. 4-5 and The Two Major Tasks of the Spiritual Life (CD, MP3 download) Gateway to Silence: Receive and reflect

 

No Words Today…

This Gift Box, Ribbon on Top, is accompanied by the Following Note…

This is an unusual day, Gentle Reader.

My town’s churches, CLOSED because of weather and driving danger.

THEREFORE:

• I got to listen to one of my ministry young people (college seminarian) preach his first sermon on the radio this morning… which was wonderful… THEN…
• I got to “attend church” with a pastor many hundreds of miles away, listening to this young  (to me) man preach, who I have prayed for all his career, having first heard him give a sermon when he was (I think) 19 years old, or so (more than 20 years ago, now)… as he was giving his life to the Gospel Ministry… and that was wonderful… THEN
• I got to hear God “put me on notice” that this was Palm Sunday, and that He again (as often in my life) was going to bring about something wonderful in/for me… come Easter Sunday… and that was wonderful.

But somewhere in the course of all that, perhaps in the internet radio portion early on… this song, that I’ve posted here… played. And it absolutely captured me. Moved me to tears, took my heart to the Throne, and took all breath and sensation away.

I have no words to wrap around this moment, this song, these words, this experience for you. All I can say is they rang deeper in me than anything I’ve ever known, and the words “Holy”… and “Glory”… have somehow transformed in me from “words” to “being”. They feel, and felt, like the very blood coursing through my veins, or the air filling my lungs. They were not “Thoughts”… they were “Dimensions in Themselves”.

They were, and are, Beauty Itself! Beyond Beautiful… so far beyond beautiful that there are no words I know to express what they ARE!

This was Gift, Gentle Reader. Jesus, this morning, handed me a wrapped Present, and Inside it, I found this song… these words.

And now, I hand them on to you… wrapped in all my love and care… filled with His Grace… to Gift you for your sacredness. These go to you with all my blessings this day!

Yours, in Him — The Little Monk

 

Ultimate Mirroring

Ethiopian Mother and Child, © Niall Crotty, used with permission

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation The True Self Ultimate Mirroring Friday, February 21, 2014

What’s happening in prayer is that you’re presenting yourself for the ultimate gaze, the ultimate mirroring, the gaze of God. Little by little you become more naked before that perfectly accepting gaze. It’s like lovemaking. You slowly disrobe and become mirrored perfectly in the gaze of God. You gradually allow yourself to be seen, to be known in every nook and cranny; nothing hidden, nothing denied, nothing disguised. And the wonderful thing is, after a while you feel so safe and you know you don’t have to pretend anymore. You recognize your need for mercy, your own utter inadequacy and littleness, that the best things you’ve ever done have been done for mixed and false motives. And the worst things you have ever done were done because you were unconscious. “Someone is giving their self to me! Someone is sustaining me,” you feel like shouting. Now this experience of being sustained, being given to without any just cause, knowing you didn’t earn it, causes the whole worthiness game to break apart. The True Self experiences reality as radical grace. Who is worthy? No one is worthy. The True Self knows this and lives quietly, calmly and contentedly inside of its radical unworthiness. You can do this because you ironically know that you are totally worthy; but it has nothing to do with you! Your worthiness is entirely given to you (Ephesians 1:3-4). All true holiness is a reflected glory. Julian of Norwich and Thomas Merton both say that what is happening in prayer is that you are allowing God to recognize God’s self in you and that’s what God always loves and cannot not love. That is God’s new and everlasting covenant with humanity (Jeremiah 31:31f, 33:19-20), promised by the prophets and ritualized in the Eucharist. The human problem is solved from the beginning, and at its core. Adapted from True Self/False Self (CD), disc 2 Gateway to Silence: Becoming who I am

 

It All Begins Here: Birth of the Sacred…

He has sent redemption to His people;
He has ordained His covenant forever;
Holy and awesome is His name.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;
A good understanding have all those who do His commandments;
His praise endures forever.  [Psalm 111:9-10]

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“It was a dark and stormy night”…

Yes, yes it was. A dark, stormy, Texas summer night… with no stars… no moon… because the sky was filled with thunderclouds. There is nothing… anywhere… like a Texas summer lightning storm. No rain, air barely moving, and it starts…

Mighty thunderbolts shoot above, below, and through the billowed silhouettes of the thunderheads… flashing blue, and violet, and sometimes even green! Huge, massive, jagged spears of pure power. And the sound… the crashing… like a thousand train wrecks, all in a jumble.

You wait for it. You know it’s coming and you wait… and suddenly there it is… Chain Lightning… It starts in one huge thunderhead, and shoots to the next, then the next, then the next… sometimes as many as six or eight links in the chain…

Magnificent. There are no words for it. It is beyond awesome! It is… GLORIOUS!

It is like standing in the midst of angels dancing in all their glory… hearing their footfalls… feeling their rhythms pounding on your chest, not just your ears.

You stand, oddly enough, in the midst of death. You realize you are in the presence of power beyond your imagination… and yet your pulse races with the sense of being immediately, presently, ALIVE, and somehow sharing in the moment.

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The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom

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The phrase had been haunting me… haunting me for weeks… it stood, stark, like a rock wall square in the path of my journey. I didn’t understand. I COULDN’T understand. But somehow… I HAD TO understand…

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom

How could this be? I sought wisdom. But I knew no fear of Him. A brilliant teacher, an Uncle in the Lord to me, once remarked that speaking to me was like, “speaking to the boy Jesus at the Temple.” That I had no religious training, upbringing, or church… but I knew Jesus and the Bible as if I’d been there. But then he added that there was only one thing wrong… one thing he didn’t understand… “Little Monk, you have no compunction whatever.” Lol… I had to ask him to define the word for me. I’d never heard it. He said, “Filial fear of the Lord.”

I remember pausing to reflect, then answering… “You’re right. I cannot imagine that. Oh, I can fear His anger… but not Him. Never Him. He’s held me on His lap since I was 3. He’s sung to me in the night. Dried my tears, and healed my hurts. How, after all that, how can I begin to ‘fear’ Him now? Can’t be done.” And I couldn’t get it, as I left Uncle’s office.

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The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom

Years after that conversation, but still, nearly 40 years ago, now… this line came back to haunt me. I sought the Lord’s face. I trained in ministry. I sought after wisdom diligently. I learned prayer, meditation, contemplation, worship, spiritual disciplines, the art of spiritual direction… all that.

But yet, I did not understand “fear of the Lord”, and I felt that hampered my quest for “wisdom”.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom

And yet, “Perfect love casts out fear”…

I could not make sense of it. I prayed to understand. I’d studied the verbiage, I knew about “awe” versus “terror”. But I still couldn’t “GET IT”. I felt I was missing something terribly important, basic, fundamental here. Something I was called to understand, and yet failing to grasp. I prayed, I waited, I listened… God answered…

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One glorious night on a flat brown Texas field… no stars… no moon… no streetlights or houselignts. Just the pitch black darkness… and then… then… the Dance of Angels in Chain Lightning.

Louder than a battlefield. Mightier than Niagara. All around me… over me… soaring…

And out of that, God, in a quiet voice saying, “Do you like it? Do you feel it? Do you feel Me here?”

The thrill of it, Gentle Reader. The awe and worship of it… No words for that.

He went on, “This could kill you, you know. This is but a ‘flex’ of My arm. But what would happen if one of these bolts hit you, standing there? Would you survive?”

Clearly not.

“Do you realize the power here? You stand in death. You realize that, don’t you?”

I did. But I was not afraid. (Perhaps I ought to have been, but the prayer, the presence, was so powerful. There was no room for fear.)

“Now, Little Monk, understand forever more… that thrill, the pulse in your chest, this awe, this worship of My very Magificence… you realize the danger here, you are not silly… but you are awestruck, dumbstruck, with the Glory that is Me, and this small illustration of it. This… THIS, Little Monk, This exhilaration that you feel right now… THIS is David’s “fear of the Lord”… and it came from nights very much like this, in his fields, with his sheep. I could make storms like this for him, too.

“This is just an expression of Me. A picture of My power and grandeur. That feeling in your chest, is ‘worship’ and ‘awe’. That is a GOOD thing. Right now, you deeply sense the ‘Sacred’… if I asked you to kneel, right there, you’d fall to your knees in a heartbeat. This is what it is, to feel the Sacred in My presence.

“But the fact that I have such unrestrained power, does not mean I ever would or will, turn it against one of My children. You have it right, Little Monk… you have awe of Me, but no fear of Me, no terror. Never change that. Just worship Me in all things.”

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The word “sacred” has become very important to me these days. It seems to define the essence of “righteousness” and of “sin”. It summarizes all of the Law, and reflects the Gospel cleanly and clearly.

To be righteous is to treat others as sacred. To sin, is to do otherwise.

Herein lies what seems to be all that is wrong with our lives, with our children, with our families, with our government, with our world.

How has everything seemed to get in such a mess? It happens when we lose our sense of the sacredness of others, of life, of other’s rights to live free and without fear. When people become “objects” rather than sacred others… When we become “users” and “operators” rather than stewards and guardians of the sacred… life loses meaning.

But… but… we cannot, as Christians, as parents, as ministers, as teachers, as friends… promote and nurture the Truth of sacredness in and for other people, or even ourselves, until the Sacred is born in us to begin with.

That’s been an amazing thing I’ve recently discovered. I asked God where I ever got this “sense of the sacred”? For it is deep in me. Deep in the soil of my heart.

And He brought me back to this Texas field on a dark and stormy night…

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God said, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”

And wisdom begins, when you discover the heart of the “Sacred”…

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Where was your dark and stormy night, Gentle Reader?