This is the final essay in a series on “Recovering Paradise.” You also can read Parts One, Two and Three.

In our exploration of the Life of Antony, we have seen a pattern in his spiritual development: the greater the depth of his inner work, the greater his engagement with the needs of the world. There is a parallel progression of contemplative practice and increasing transparency to God’s love made available for the healing of the world. It is not Antony who does the work, but rather the power of Christ. Antony’s part is to become empty and open to receive and mediate this power.

As Antony is restored to his natural condition, he increasingly participates in the restoration of the earth as the paradise God intends it to be. Implicit in this progression is the understanding that our natural condition has become obscured by evil: both the evil we suffer and the evil in which we are complicit. The other pattern we notice in Antony’s spiritual progress is an increasing capacity, not only to recover paradise, but also to recognize the scope of evil in the world without becoming fascinated or incapacitated by it.

Initially, Antony struggles against the demons, who assault him from within and from without. Eventually, however, he perceives the light of Christ, which relieves him of the sense of struggle even as the assaults of the enemy increase over the course of Antony’s life. He becomes more aware of the reality of evil even as its power to affect him diminishes. We are told that

he remained in no wise harmed by the evil spirits, nor was he wearied with the contest, for there came to his aid visions from above, and the weakness of the foe relieved him of much trouble and armed him with greater zeal.^[1]

It is this “vision from above,” in light of which he recognizes the ultimate powerlessness of evil, that gives Antony the courage and willingness to participate in God’s project of renewing the world through Christ. Antony recognizes that sin and death are penultimate realities that ultimately pale to insignificance in the light of “the love that never fails.”

Antony’s practice of attention and self-emptying, his consent to becoming completely aligned with the power of God in Christ, bears fruit in his capacity to love the world as God loves it; as it is, not as we would have it to be; trusting that it is, in God’s good time, sometimes in hidden and mysterious ways, already being restored to paradise.

Antony is not naïve, he does not flee from the difficulties of life in the world, but the presence of evil no longer distracts him from the love that never fails. This love has been definitively demonstrated in the Christ event, delivering us forever from the power of evil to define us. Because of the Incarnation of God in Christ and the gift of His Spirit, all things are being restored to their natural condition. God became human so that we might become divine, mirroring the imago Dei in all things.

Perhaps no one in the modern age has affirmed this truth more powerfully than Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and martyr who resisted the Nazi regime. Writing during the height of Nazi power, Bonhoeffer declared

Ecce homo – behold God become human, the unfathomable mystery of the love of God for the world. God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love. God establishes the most intimate unity with this. God becomes human, a real human being . . . Jesus Christ is not the transfiguration of noble humanity but the Yes of God to real human beings, not the dispassionate Yes of a judge but the merciful Yes of a compassionate sufferer. In this Yes all the life and all the hope of the world are comprised.^[2]

In the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the world has been judged and redeemed by God in all of its brokenness. “The secret, however, of this judgment, this suffering, and this dying, is the love of God for the world, for human beings.”^[3] Love bears all things to restore us to our natural condition of unending communion with God. Such reconciliation is costly.

Such love is neither a sentimental feeling nor an intellectual abstraction. As Bonhoeffer recognized,

[Love] is the reality of being drawn and drawing others into an event, namely, into God’s community with the world, which has already been accomplished in Jesus Christ. “Love” does not exist as an abstract attribute of God but only in God’s actual loving of human beings and the world. Again, “love” does not exist as a human attribute but only as a real belonging-together and being-together of people with other human beings and with the world, based on God’s love that is extended to me and to them. Just as God’s love entered the world, thereby submitting to the misunderstanding and ambiguity that characterize everything worldly, so also Christian love does not exist anywhere but in the worldly, in the infinite variety of concrete worldly action, and subject to misunderstanding and condemnation . . . The purity of love, therefore, will not consist in keeping itself apart from the world, but will prove itself precisely in its worldly form. Seen from this vantage point, it is not only possible but obligatory to understand historical action as Christian action, as action that springs from God’s love that becomes human.^[4]

The practice of eros, loving as God loves, can never be an escape from the problems of the world. There is no cheap grace. God’s grace is freely given, but in equipping us to love as God loves, this grace entails risk. It was this love that drove Antony out of his solitude to accompany the martyrs to Alexandria. It was this love that embroiled him in the resolution of difficult conflicts in the community. It was this love that made him an intimate of the sick, the outcast, and the marginalized who had no other advocate.

The dignity of the human being and the sacredness of the earth is grounded in the incontrovertible fact that God loves the world.

Indeed, in Jesus the Christ, God endured the judgment of the world, suffering evil that He might overcome it through the might of His deathless love. In the Mystery of the Incarnation, we receive visions from above that reveal just how weak is the enemy. Evil is purely parasitical. It has no power to endure of its own accord. Realizing this, we can become free, like St. Antony, to respond to evil in life-giving ways.

Reflecting on his own experience of evil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted that there are three ways in which we become tempted to participate in the violation of human dignity and the desecration of the earth. The first temptation is the idolization of human power in the face of fear and uncertainty.

The weaknesses of human nature appear more clearly in a storm than in the quiet flow of calmer times. Among the overwhelming majority of people, anxiety, greed, lack of independence, and brutality show themselves to be the mainspring of behavior in the face of unsuspected chance and threats. At such a time the tyrannical despiser of humanity easily makes use of the meanness of the human heart by nourishing it and giving it other names. Anxiety is called responsibility; greed is called industriousness; lack of independence is called solidarity; brutality becomes masterfulness. By this ingratiating treatment of human weakness, what is base and mean is generated and increased ever anew. The basest contempt for humanity carries on its sinister business under the most holy assertions of love for humanity. The meaner the baseness becomes, the more willing and pliant a tool it is in the hand of the tyrant. The small number of upright people will be smeared with mud. Their courage is called revolt, their discipline Pharisaism, their independence arbitrariness, and their masterfulness arrogance. For the tyrannical despiser of humanity, popularity is a sign of the greatest love for humanity. He hides his secret profound distrust of all people behind the stolen words of true community. While he declares himself before the masses as one of them, he praises himself with repulsive vanity and despises the rights of every individual. He considers the people stupid, and they become stupid; he considers them weak, and they become weak; he considers them criminal, and they become criminal. His most holy seriousness is frivolous play; his conventional protestations of solicitude for people are bare-faced cynicism. In his deep contempt for humanity, the more he seeks the favor of those he despises, the more certainly he arouses the masses to declare him a god. Contempt for humanity and idolization of humanity lie close together.^[6]

Bonhoeffer could be describing the phenomenon of Trumpism in our own time. It is the reversal of all values in which evil is called good, words mean nothing, and freedom is exchanged for mass participation in the elixir of violent power. This is evil in its purest form.

There are, however, more subtle forms of complicity with evil.

Good people, however, who see through all this, who withdraw in disgust from people and leave them to themselves, and who would rather tend to their own gardens than debase themselves in public life, fall prey to the same temptation to contempt for humanity as do bad people. Their contempt for humanity is of course more noble, more upright, but at the same time less fruitful, poorer in deeds. Faced by God’s becoming human, this contempt will stand the test no better than that of the tyrant. The despiser of humanity despises what God has loved, despises the very form of God become human.^[7]

This is, perhaps, a peculiarly contemplative temptation: to retreat into interiority and abdicate one’s responsibility for the renewal of the world. Such a retreat betrays an actual contempt for human beings, whether through self-righteousness sectarianism or cynical indifference. Here, one perceives the reality of evil but refuses the risk of love.

Finally, Bonhoeffer describes what I call the liberal, humanitarian temptation:

There is, however, also a sincerely intended love for humanity that amounts to the same thing as contempt for humanity. It rests on evaluating human beings according to their dormant values – the health, reasonableness, and goodness deep beneath the surface. (This love for humanity grows mostly in peaceful times. But also in times of great crisis these values can on occasion shine forth and become the basis for a hard-won and honest love for humanity.) With forced tolerance, evil is interpreted as good, meanness is overlooked, and the reprehensible is excused. For various reasons one shies away from a clear No, and finally agrees to everything. One loves a self-made picture of human beings that has little similarity to reality, and one ends up despising the real human being whom God has loved and whose being God has taken on.^[8]

Bonhoeffer is describing the temptation to love the world as we would like it to be, rather than as it is, denying or tolerating actual evil in the misguided belief that people and institutions are ultimately good. “He can’t really mean that.” “Oh, that will never happen here.” It can happen here. It has happened here. Though evil, unlike love, cannot endure forever, its reality, however long or short lived, must be acknowledge honestly, resisted, and overcome by the power of authentic love: love that is willing to risk everything for the sake of real human beings and the real world.

I’ve dwelled at some length on Bonhoeffer’s witness because it is so timely, and because he underscores the message of the desert fathers and mothers that contemplative practice is in the service of the apokatastasis panton – the renewal of all things. Real love, God’s love, is costly. It requires a willingness to give ourselves away for a larger good. It does not do so out of fear of punishment or hope of rewards, but for the sake of love itself.

The subtle temptations described by Bonhoeffer illuminate a real tension in the life of Antony and that of all contemplatives: the tension between an increasing capacity to perceive reality as it is, and an increasing capacity to love that which we perceive. How is it possible to comprehend the reality of a broken world and love it in its very brokenness: to not become overwhelmed, or bitter, or depressed? If contemplative practice cannot help us to do that, then it is truly good for nothing.

It is possible when we practice kenosis, self-emptying, and trust that it is God at work in us and through us who is doing the heavy lifting. We have to become willing to align ourselves with the flow of compassion in the world. Our hope is not in some future event, but in what God already has done in Jesus Christ, overcoming the power of sin and death. When the healing power of God’s love becomes the touchstone of our experience, it can inform all of our actions in and for the world. We become willing to die with Christ, as St. Paul puts it, so that we might also share in His resurrection, risking love with trust and even joy.^[9]

Such self-emptying, however, requires more than just contemplative awareness. We must not only see reality as it is but also weep for it as it is. How can we see and not grieve? Tears are an indispensable component of contemplative practice.

The desert mothers and fathers speak, in fact, of the gift of tears. They describe this gift as penthos, often translated as compunction, “a profound piercing of the heart that is the very source of tears.”^[10] They taught that the cultivation of an openness to tears, an acceptance of grief, was crucial to spiritual growth.

A brother asked an elder, “What should I do?” And the old man said to him, “We ought always to weep . . . “Let us weep,” Abba Macarius counseled his disciples, “and let tears gush out of our eyes . . .”^[11]

Why this emphasis on tears? Tears were considered a sign of honest appraisal of the self and the world, our fragility and mortality. This must be acknowledged and integrated, else progress in the spiritual life will be undermined by denial of unexamined fears. Not that tears could or should be forced. This was not a counsel of contrived, maudlin display. It was an invitation to allow genuine feeling for the world to open the heart to being transfigured by compassion.

The monastic practice of memento mori, keeping always before one’s eyes the awareness of death – one’s own death, and that of all life forms – fostered the realization of just how precious life is, and our responsibility to hedge it round with care. Tears reconnect us to the world, breaking through the fear and illusion that alienate us from life and from one another.

The early Christian monks knew that tears could help break open the soul, kindling a deeper awareness of one’s vulnerability and fragility, and one’s capacity for intimacy with God and all living beings. But opening oneself in this way required courage, a willingness to face one’s own fragility as well as the fragility and brokenness of the world. It meant refusing the temptation to evade the reality of those bonds that connect all beings to each other, and embracing the reality of a shared world. Weeping, when understood as part of a conscious spiritual practice, had the capacity to flood the soul with an awareness of the intricacy, beauty, and spiritual value of all existence.^[12]

Penthos, the gift of tears, is both the doorway into life, and the sign that we are not only alive, but awake. The depth of our grief is the measure of our capacity to love. Yet, this emphasis on the gift of tears comes with a cautionary note.

Grief can cleanse the lens of perception and connect us with the dynamic energy of divine compassion. This is grief in the service of life. It remains grounded in faith, hope, and love. There is another kind of grief, Amma Syncletica warns us, that leads to cynicism and despair. It leaves us listless, believing that nothing we do matters. It is severed from faith, hope, and love. The first kind of grief – the gift of tears – is to be welcomed. The second kind of grief – the temptation of accidie – requires the healing that continued contemplative practice opens us to receive from God.

It is interesting to note that the Life of Antony records only one instance of the blessed saint weeping. Antony receives a vision of the rise of the Arian heresy in the Church, which led to violent conflict in Egypt and much of Byzantium. The old man, with tears running down his cheeks, said, “Wrath is about to seize the Church, and it is on the point of being given up to men who are like senseless beasts.”^[14] The Arian controversy divided the Church, which devolved into violent conflict that undermined its witness.

This is an example of Amma Snycletica’s first kind of grief, and she would approve of it, because it was moved by penthos, a sorrow over sin that moves one to compassion and remains connected to a larger hope. Though he wept, Abba Antony also “comforted those with him, saying,”

Be not downcast, my children; for as the Lord has been angry, so again will He heal us, and the Church shall soon again receive her own order, and shall shine forth as she is wont.^[15]

Evil may have its moment, but the outcome is never in doubt in its contest with “the love that never fails.” But until then, we weep. For as Abba Poemen said, “Truly, there is no other way.”

It is crucial for us to grasp that the return to paradise is only possible if we are open to the whole of reality, including the integration of suffering. The violence and anger that permeates our culture is actually a result of fear. Fear of economic insecurity, cultural differences, changing demographics, global terrorism, and climate change, whether consciously or not, drives the continuing cycle of exploitation and violence in our culture.

Behind all these lurks the fear of death, and the willingness to sacrifice victims to assuage our fears: whether immigrants, or Muslims, or people of color, or entire species and ecosystems. We are in the grip of the culture of death. We live in denial of the loss and suffering that is all around us, or else respond with anger in ways that only increase the problem. We need to acknowledge our fear, and we need to grieve the real suffering that fuels our fears.

Given the enormity of the loss we are experiencing in our time, engaging our grief at a personal and cultural level is an enormous undertaking. It is only possible if we can trust that our tears will cleanse the lens of perception so that we can find our way home again, and reconnect with a larger whole. We can return to paradise. Knowing this, we find the courage to accept reality and the capacity to respond creatively and compassionately to suffering.

Beyond the violence and fear of our cultural conditioning, there is within us an innate and inviolable desire for God and love of all things in God. If we are willing to acknowledge our grief all the way down to the bottom, we will find ourselves falling into an abyss of love without limit, in which all things are held in radiant Being. From there, we can begin to see and act. We can bet our lives on the risk of “the love that never fails.” We can return to paradise.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

^[1] St. Athanasius, “Life of Antony” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Volume IV (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), p. 199.

^[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), pp. 84 – 85.

^[3] Bonhoeffer, p. 88.

^[4] Bonhoeffer, pp. 241-242.

^[5] John 3:16-17.

^[6] Bonhoeffer, pp. 85-86.

^[7] Ibid., pp. 86-87.

^[8] Ibid., p. 87.

^[9] Philippians 3:10-15.

^[10] Douglas Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes For A Contemplative Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 74.

^[11] Ibid., p. 75.

^[12] Ibid., p. 77.

^[13] Laura Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women (Paulist Press: Mahwah, NJ, 2001), p. 63.

^[14] Athanasius, pp. 217-218.

^[15] Ibid., p. 218.

This is the third in series of essays on “Recovering Paradise.” You can read the first essay here and the second essay here.

Last week, quoting John Cassian, I pointed out that the telos or end of the monastic ideal is “the love which never fails.” The Desert Mothers and Fathers understood that their ascetical disciplines were simply a means of cultivating a willingness to be set free from ego-centric preoccupations so that they might become transparent to God’s love.

As Thomas Merton notes,

All through the Verba Seniorum we find a repeated insistence on the primacy of love over everything else in the spiritual life: over knowledge, gnosis, asceticism, contemplation, solitude, prayer. Love in fact is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions. The more lofty they are, the more dangerous the illusion.

Love, of course, means something much more than mere sentiment, much more than token favours and perfunctory almsdeeds. Love means an interior and spiritual identification with one’s brother, so that he is not regarded as an “object” to “which” one “does good.” The fact is that good done to another as an object is of little or no spiritual value. Love take’s one’s neighbor as one’s other self, and loves him with all the immense humility and discretion and reserve and reverence without which no one can presume to enter into the sanctuary of another’s subjectivity. From such love all authoritarian brutality, all exploitation, domineering and condescension must necessarily be absent.^[2]

The life of the monk is far from passionless. It is, in fact, motivated by a profound desire for communion with God and all things in God, the relentless yearning of eros: the love that unites that which is separated. Through the cultivation of eros, desire, the monk is one who comes to see the self as other. The monk does not desire to flee the world, but rather to obtain a certain freedom, a certain perspective, that allows one to perceive and experience the interrelatedness of all things in God and to participate in the healing and reconciling work of love.

Just as the interior discipline of the monk aims at the recovery of his or her natural condition, so too the fruit of the discipline opens outward toward a reimagining of the world as paradise, restored to its natural condition, and an increasing capacity to respond to this reality with gratitude and love. Progress in the spiritual life is an endlessly expansive embrace of reality in love.

Our desire for God, in so far as it is a desire for a love that is infinite, is like an ever-receding horizon. To surrender to this desire is to be continually drawn beyond oneself into the divine eros that is never satiated. This is eternal life, experienced, as St. Gregory of Nyssa describes it, as epectasis, “endless spiritual progress rooted in desire.”^[3] As we become ever more deeply immersed in the love of God, we realize more fully the perichoresis or coinherence of all of reality: the extent to which I am constituted by you and you are constituted by me. Loving my neighbor as myself then becomes the most natural thing in the world, because my neighbor is myself.

Here one encounters one expression of an idea whose importance would only continue to deepen and grow in Christian contemplative experience: that all beings are bound together in a single, unbroken fabric and that the work of reknitting the torn fabric requires opening oneself to the healing presence of desire in the soul. Arriving at an awareness of this truth is but one moment in a larger process of renewal. But it is a critical moment. Living into this desire more fully means allowing the soul to be remade in love, will all the risk and relinquishment that this entails. Only through this transformative work can the boundaries separating oneself from God and others begin to dissolve. Only then can true exchange and reciprocity become possible. Only in this way can the torn fabric that binds everything together begin to be repaired. The Christian contemplative tradition devotes continuous attention to the work of understanding what it might mean to live into this transformative vision of existence.^[4]

The Life of Antony was the model for living into this vision for the Desert Mothers and Fathers. At the age of 55, in about the year 305, Abba Antony emerged from his contemplative solitude to practice eros, to embody “the love that never fails.” The first thing to notice about this stage of his development is that it entails a renewed commitment to responsibility for the life of the larger community.

Indeed, even while practicing in solitude, Antony was never bereft of community. From the beginning, Antony’s practiced his discipline within and for the Church. It was the Church that formed him in faith and through which he received his call. He was sustained by the sacramental life of the Church and the pastoral care of its members. They supported him in observing the discipline, because they recognized that his inner work would benefit the whole community.

Antony taught that “The Scriptures are enough for instruction, but it is a good thing to encourage one another in the faith, and to stir up with words.”^[5] He recognized his dependence upon others to teach him the Scriptures, and he committed them to memory since he was illiterate. Even though he would become a famous and well respected teacher during his own lifetime,

he observed the rule of the Church most rigidly, and was willing that all the clergy should be honoured above himself. For he was not ashamed to bow his head to bishops and presbyters, and if ever a deacon came to him for help he discoursed with him on what was profitable, but gave place to him in prayer, not being ashamed to learn himself. For often he would ask questions, and desired to listen to those who were present, and if any one said anything that was useful he confessed that he was profited.^[6]

During his long solitude, he began to draw a community of disciples around him. People wanted what he had! They ripped the door off of the abandoned fort where he resided in seclusion for twenty years. When he emerged, he lived in community with other monks, and “directed them as a father.”^[7] Antony recognized his obligation to pass on what he has experienced for the benefit of others: to “pay it forward,” if you will.

Antony remains in his mountain retreat, living in a cell with other monks nearby. He never ceased to practice the discipline, prosoche and kenosis, awareness and self-emptying, but now there is a shift to sharing the fruit of the practice with others: the practice of eros. Together, they formed an alternative community in the wilderness.

So their cells were in the mountains, like tabernacles, filled with holy bands of men who sang psalms, loved reading, fasted, prayed, rejoiced in the hope of things to come, labored in almsgiving, and preserved love and harmony one with another. And truly it was possible as it were, to behold a land set by itself, filled with piety and justice.^[8]

Antony preserves in his practice, and guards his solitude, but is willing to engage with the wider community as a teacher, healer, exorcist, and agent of reconciliation. During the persecution of the Church under the Emperor Maximinus II, Antony goes to Alexandria to encourage and comfort the martyrs, provoking the Governor to such an extent that he bans monks from appearing in the courtroom. Antony continues to show up anyway, quite willing to be a martyr himself.

But the Lord was keeping him for our profit and that of others, that he should become a teacher to many of the discipline which he had learned from the Scriptures. For many only beholding his manner of life were eager to be imitators of his ways. So he again ministered as usual to the confessors, and as though he were their fellow captive he labored in his ministry.^[9]

He identifies with those who were suffering as though he were their fellow captive. When the persecution ends, Antony returns to his cell, but remains engaged in the life of the world and with the needs of others. In fact, we are told that “he championed those who were wronged in such a way that you would imagine that he, and not the others, was the sufferer.”^[10] This is the practice of eros, of seeing the self as the other. This is hardly the picture of someone who has fled the world, escaping to tend his own little garden with no regard for others.

Even so, the more deeply Antony practices eros, the more insistent he is on a greater need for solitude. It is as if the depth of his love for others requires an even more profound commitment to the discipline to sustain it. The more open and vulnerable to the needs of the world Antony becomes, the more urgent is the need for him to attend to his inner life. He resolves to move more deeply into the “inner desert” and follows a band of Saracens for three days until he arrives at another, more isolated mountain. Here he discovers another dimension of love: homecoming.

“Antony then, as it were, moved by God, loved the place . . . And recognizing is as his own home, he remained in that place for the future.”^[11] He is alone again, except for some brothers who hazard the journey to bring him supplies. Not wishing to trouble them, Antony tills a small plot of land to grow his own food. When the wild beasts, coming for water, injure the garden, Antony lays hold of one of them and instructs them all to leave him in peace. They obey.^[12]

I would suggest that the practice of eros, loving the other as one’s self, expands to encompass the love of the earth and its creatures. The monastic ideal of return to one’s natural condition, in freedom and love, includes living in harmony with nature on a sustainable basis as part of the recovery of paradise. This is what Antony discovers on the inner mountain. His desire for God, the inexhaustible Source of eros, opens him up to communion with all things.

Antony’s disciple is no longer simply about the healing of his own soul. It is also about the apokatastasis panton – the renewal of the world. Antony is now an old man. His disciples come once a month to bring him staples such as olives and oil that he cannot provide for himself.

There then he passed his life, and endured such great wrestlings, ‘Not against flesh and blood,’ as it is written, but against opposing demons, as we learned from those who visited him. For there they heard tumults, many voices, and as it were, the clash of arms. At night they saw the mountain become full of wild beasts, and him also fighting as though against visible beings, and praying against them . . . Surely it was a marvelous thing that a man, alone in such a desert, feared neither the demons who rose up against him, nor the fierceness of four-footed beasts and creeping things, for all they were so many. But in truth, as it is written, ‘He trusted in the Lord as Mount Zion,’ with a mind unshaken and undisturbed; so that the demons rather fled from him, and the wild beasts, as it is written, ‘kept peace with him.’^[13]

We are presented with an image of one who enters into profound intercession, practicing eros for the whole world, freeing the land of the demonic forces that bring division and death. It is the image of one who is at peace with all of creation. The integration of his inner life is reflected in his harmony with his environment.

Even here, on the inner mountain, people are drawn to Antony despite the hazards of the journey. We are told that, at this latter stage of his life,

his countenance had a great and perfect grace. This gift also he had from the Saviour. For if he were present in a great company of monks, and any one who did not know him previously, wished to see him, immediately coming forward he passed by the rest, and hurried to Antony, as though attracted by his appearance. Yet neither in height nor breadth was he conspicuous above others, but in the serenity of his manner and the purity of his soul. For as his soul was free from disturbances, his outward appearance was calm; so from the joy of his soul he possessed a cheerful countenance . . . ^[14]

Not only monks, but supplicants for healing, disputants to various conflicts, philosophers in search of wisdom, even Emperor Constantine sought him out. When he received the letter from Constantine and his sons, Antony refused to respond. He was not impressed by such things, and consented to reply only after being pressed by the monks to do so. Finally,

he wrote an answer approving them because they worshipped Christ, and giving them counsel on things pertaining to salvation: ‘not to think much of the present, but rather to remember the judgement that is coming, and to know that Christ alone was the true and Eternal King.’ He begged them to be merciful and to give heed to justice and the poor. And they having received the answer rejoiced. Thus he was dear to all, and all desired to consider him as a father.^[15]

Antony’s practice of eros drew people to him. They wanted to be held in love. They wanted to return with him to paradise. This is, it seems to me, a beautiful model of Christian maturity.

Antony exemplifies what Douglas Christie describes as

The fundamental importance of the relationship between the simple contemplative gesture of opening oneself to the other and the ethical imperative to care for the other. The Christian contemplative tradition insists that the longing to open oneself to the immensity of the divine mystery can never be separated from the practical work of tending to the life of the community – something that is often expressed as a form of accompaniment. Still, this tradition also affirms that the only way of understanding one’s place within and responsibility for the larger community is through a deep and abiding sense of participation in the mystery of the whole. The contemplative practice of attending to the desire that draws us out of the narrow confines of the guarded, fearful self and into a condition of vulnerability and openness to the Other can be costly. But it is also precisely this intense vulnerability that allows the contemplative practice of eros to become a healing work and to contribute something important to the work of reweaving the torn fabric of the world.^[16]

Christie goes on to note that the great gift of the contemplative tradition is that it gives us a set of practices to heal and educate our desire, so that it may be united with God’s desire for the apokatastasis panton – the renewal of all things. Yet, becoming a shining light in the wilderness like Antony is not easy, and it is not without cost. In the final essay in this series, we will consider the cost: the inevitability of grief, and the gift of tears, which are the paradoxical sign of our progress in “the love which never fails.”

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

^[1] Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert (New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 1970), p. 50.

^[2] Merton, pp. 17-18.

^[3] Douglas Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes For A Contemplative Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 245.

^[4] Christie, pp. 249-250.

^[5] St. Athanasius, “Life of Antony” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Volume IV (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), p. 200.

^[6] Ibid., p. 214.

^[7] Ibid., p. 200.

^[8] Ibid., p. 208.

^[9] Ibid., pp. 208-209.

^[10] Ibid., p. 219.

^[11] Ibid., p. 209.

^[12] Ibid., p. 210.

^[13] Ibid., p. 210.

^[14] Ibid., p. 214.

^[15] Ibid., p. 217.

^[16] Christie, p. 263-264.

This is the second in series of essays on “Recovering Paradise.” You can read the first essay here.

In the year 285, at about the age of 35, St. Antony retreated to a mountain in the wilderness, where he enclosed himself in an abandoned fort. The fort had a source of water within it, and Antony’s friends brought him a supply of bread every six months. Here, he lived in solitude for 20 years, continuing the discipline, the practice of prosoche.

His spiritual practice now, however, has a different quality. Previously, he had struggled with his inner demons for 15 years, until he is finally set free from the mental obsessions, temptations, and illusions that distract him from the love of God. It is not that the demons have left him. They are still there, but are now integrated into his consciousness such that they no longer dominate his thinking or being.

When his friends come to visit him, he refuses them entrance, but they camp outside the fort for days at a time. It seems to them that they hear crowds inside, making a great noise and crying out for Antony to leave them alone. The demons are still raging around Antony.

But he remained in no wise harmed by the evil spirits, nor was he wearied with the contest, for there came to his aid visions from above, and the weakness of the foe relieved him of much trouble and armed him with greater zeal.^[1]

Antony’s friends expect to find him dead, but instead hear him singing.

The Life of Antony provides us an image of the freedom, the purity of heart, sought by the Desert Mothers and Fathers. Antony is fully aware of the forces of evil in the world, but he is not attached to the distorted desires that they seek to stimulate. They no longer have the power to get a reaction from him.

At this stage, Antony is no longer trying to renounce anything. He isn’t trying to get rid of the demons. Now that he sees them clearly – now that he recognizes that their promises are illusory, how weak they really are – they simply are no longer very interesting. He doesn’t have to fight them; they just drop away.

This is the fruit of the practice of prosoche, of paying attention to his thoughts. He is no longer unconsciously reacting to every internal and external trigger that used to trip him up. His willingness to be vulnerable, to expose the wounded places within his soul to the healing power of God’s love, has released him from self-preoccupation and attachment to disabling desires. The practice of prosoche has become the practice of kenosis; the work of paying attention has become the work of letting go. Antony has emptied himself so that he might be filled with the fullness of God.

After twenty years of solitude, of practicing letting go, Antony emerges from the fort at the insistence of the growing number of men who wish to become his disciples. As they wrench the door of the fort off its hinges, “Antony, as from a shrine, came forth initiated in the mysteries and filled with the spirit of God.”^[2]

The would-be disciples are amazed, for Antony is whole in body and his soul is unblemished. He is fifty-five years old now, and he still looks great! We are told that he is “all balanced, as one governed by reason and standing in his natural condition.”^[3] Antony has been restored to his natural condition. He returned to paradise, to the condition of Adam and Eve before the “Fall” into desire distorted by envy, rivalry, and violence; that is to say, the fall into the normalcy of civilization. It is this “fallen” condition that is unnatural.

Antony has become himself. What he has let go is the “unnatural” or false consciousness he had internalized from the culture of Empire. It is as if the mirror of his soul had become encrusted with dirt and grime, and only now is he seeing himself clearly. He is seeing the image of God, in which he was created, reflected in the mirror. As soon as Antony emerges from his seclusion, other people notice the difference as well.

Through him the Lord healed the bodily ailments of many present, and cleansed others from evil spirits. And He gave grace to Antony in speaking, so that he consoled many that were sorrowful, and set those at variance at one, exhorting all to prefer the love of Christ before all that is in the world.^[4]

For the next fifty years, until his death at the age of 105, Antony will exercise a remarkable ministry of teaching, healing, and reconciliation. One of the themes that constantly reverberates through the Life of Antony is that it is Christ who is at work through Antony. Antony has become empty so that Christ can be all in all. This is what it means for human beings to return to paradise: It is to realize the divine within us, which is our natural condition.

But what does it mean to practice self-emptying? What does the discipline of kenosis look like?

It isn’t something that we do so much as it is something that we undergo. It is an act of trust that God will restore us if we are willing to entrust ourselves to God. “For,” as Antony reminded his disciples,

We need only be willing. We need only get out of our own way, so that the kingdom of heaven can emerge as our natural condition from which all the virtues will inherently flow. When we do so, we become transparent to the flow of God’s power into the world.

Antony, at any rate, healed not by commanding, but by prayer and speaking the name of Christ. So that it was clear to all that it was not himself who worked, but the Lord who showed mercy by his means and healed the sufferers. But Antony’s part was only prayer and discipline . . .^[6]

Our part is simply to become willing to turn our attention to our desire for God through prayer and discipline. The freedom that the Desert Mothers and Fathers sought, which they called purity of heart, is the freedom to attend to our deepest desire: the love of God for its own sake. Self-emptying is a process of letting go, of detachment from our ego-driven pursuits so that we can become usable for God.

Summarizing the teaching of the Desert Fathers and Mothers in his Conferences, John Cassian describes this realization of love variously as eternal life or as the kingdom of God, which is both in us and us in it.

. . . the aim of our profession is the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. But our point of reference, our objective is a clean heart, without which it is impossible for anyone to reach out target.^[7]

Our objective is purity of heart, which [St. Paul] so justly describes as sanctification, for without this the goal cannot be reached. In other words, it is as though he said that you have purity of heart for an objective and eternal life as the goal.^[8]

Purity of heart is described not only as sanctification but as perfection. Perfection, however, is not identified with moral striving or ascetical discipline per se. These only are means toward the end of perfection, and they must arise from and give rise to love.

Perfection, then, is clearly not achieved simply by being naked, by the lack of wealth or by the rejection of honors, unless there is also that love whose ingredients the apostle described and which is to be found solely in purity of heart.^[9]

In the same way, fasting, vigils, scriptural meditation, nakedness, and total deprivation do not constitute perfection but are the means to perfection. They are not themselves the end point of a discipline, an end is attained through them.^[1]

In fact, such good works without love are a barrier to the realization of communion with God because they serve only to reify a false self-image and sense of self-importance. Cassian argues that “anything which can trouble the purity and the peace of our heart must be avoided as something very dangerous, regardless of how useful and necessary it might actually seem to be.”^[11] Purity of heart requires us to relinquish our attachment even to our good works, for such attachments engender self-centeredness rather than love and divert us from our true end.

This is a subtle matter of motivation and intention. Purity of heart, as understood by the Desert Mothers and Fathers, is not primarily a matter of moral striving. It isn’t achieved by being busy with things human or divine. Purity of heart is desire without attachment, and its preeminent sign is humility. Detachment does not mean indifference or lack of compassion. It has more to do with a kind of solid grounding in God the liberates the ego from being reactive and defensive.

Such detachment is not easily realized or understood. We frequently are deeply attached to the attainment of what we desire, perhaps especially our desires for such good things as peace, justice, and healing. In fact, it seems immoral not to be attached to “good” desires.

In a passage worth quoting at length, Gerald May points out that

The message of contemplative traditions does not come easily upon this scene. It is that attachments, even though they are an integral part of us all, are not really necessary for full, effective living. Desires are necessary, they not only signal our biological needs but can also spur us toward creative action in the world. Desires to care for others, to make the world a better place, to know God or to be in accord with universal law, to create and to forgive and to heal – all of these are not only worthwhile but may constitute our only hope for continuing as a species. But attachments, say the contemplatives, do nothing but confuse, preoccupy, and muddy our minds. They create needless personal suffering. And they impede one’s capacity to make creative, healing contributions to the world.

Attachment to any desire creates two fundamental problems that interfere with one’s responsiveness to the world. First, attachment adds a quality of drivenness to basic desire. One no longer simply needs or wants something but instead starts grasping, clinging, or clawing for it. There is an atmosphere of desperation about this process, a deep frenzy that pulls the fundamental need way out of proportion. Second, attachment causes distorted perception. Being so invested in our own feelings, we may totally misperceive and misinterpret the nature of things around us. In such instances, our behavior springs not from the natural and inherent requirements of a situation but from our preconceived notions. We see not what is, but what we crave or fear.

Either of these effects alone can create significant problems, but when drivenness is combined with distorted perception, as in vicious racial prejudice or religiopolitical crusades, the results can be awesomely devastating. Attachment, then, can be seen as a major determining factor in social injustice as well as in private psychological suffering. The more we are attached to the attachment, the more vicious that turmoil can become. But still we cling.^[14]

May helps us to see clearly that purity of heart depends upon both awareness and detachment. The monastic ideal is the cultivation of awareness of reality, while also acknowledging and letting go attachments so that desire for God is unencumbered by egoism or distorted perception. Purity of heart is marked by humility precisely because its realization necessarily involves an acceptance of suffering, of responsibility, and of finitude – not an easy combination to integrate!

Purity of heart is the state of desire without attachment because all desire is fulfilled in the love of God and there is no other object left with which to become attached. There is just being in Love. Cassian describes this beautifully:

Detachment then, is the perfect love that casts out fear. It is surprisingly joyful.

The story is told that one of the elders lay dying in Scete, and the brethren surrounded his bed, dressed him in a shroud, and began to weep. But he opened his eyes and laughed. He laughed another time, and then a third time. When the brethren saw this, they asked him, saying: Tell us, Father, why you are laughing while we weep? He said to them: I laughed the first time because you fear death. I laughed the second time because you are not ready for death. And the third time I laughed because from labours I go to my rest. As soon as he said this, he closed his eyes in death.^[16]

The cultivation of purity of heart through contemplative and ascetical disciplines helps to prepare us for the gift of communion with God, now and at the hour of our death. We can’t make it happen, but we can dispose ourselves to receive it. We can become willing to let go of attachments so that our desire can find its true fulfillment in communion with God.

Then we can act in freedom, liberated from the willfulness and distortions bred by attachment. We can engage in good works without being preoccupied with them in ways that sever our sense of rootedness in Love. We can begin to allow God to work through us, rather than trying to bolster our ego and assuage feelings of insecurity or guilt. And we will do this with great humility, for the clarity of perception we are given reveals our spiritual and moral limitations as well as those of others.

In the life of Abba Antony, we see the relationship between the practice of prosoche, paying attention to our thoughts, and the practice of kenosis, of self-emptying, de-centering the ego so that we can become transparent to love. The cultivation of awareness and detachment prepared Antony to be restored to his natural condition. He fell in love with God and all things in God.

In the next installment of this series on “Recovering Paradise,” we will examine the shape of love in Antony’s life, and its implications for our own recovery of paradise.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

^[1] St. Athanasius, “Life of Antony” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Volume IV (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), p. 199.

^[2] St. Athanasius, p. 200.

^[3] Derwas J. Chitty, The Desert A City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999), p. 4.

^[4] St. Athanasius, p. 200.

^[5] Ibid, p. 201.

^[6] Ibid, p. 218.

^[7] John Cassian, Conferences I.4.

^[8] Ibid, Conferences I.5.

^[9] Ibid, Conferences I.6.

^[10] Ibid, Conferences I.7.

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] Ibid, Conferences I.8.

^[13] Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert (New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 1970), pp. 61-62.

^[14] Gerald May, Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1982), pp. 227-228.

^[15] Cassian, Conferences XI.9.

^[16] Merton, pp. 49-50.

For most of my adult life, I have harbored a fantasy of becoming a monk. I tease my husband that, if he ever gets hit by a bus, I’m moving to the monastery! For me, this fantasy is rooted in a very real appreciation for monastic life and the gifts that it offers to the wider church and to the world. I’ve long intuited that the lives of the desert fathers and mothers have much to teach those of us who remain “in the world.” There is a commonly held, but much mistaken, view of the monk as one who flees the world to cultivate an interior or heavenly state of being. Life in the world is renounced for the sake of some other, better world.

This is not the case at all. The monk seeks the attainment of authentic freedom in its intrapsychic, interpersonal, and social dimensions. The discipline of the monk is in the service of this freedom, a freedom exercised in conformity with God’s will for the renewal of the world or apokatastasis panton. The monastic ideal is nothing less than the recovery of paradise.

Douglas Christie, describing this ideal, writes,

At the heart of this practice lay the hope that, amidst the fragmentation and alienation that threatened to undo life completely, a new, free, and authentic self might be born. This dream of freedom, which the monks conceived of as the recovery of paradise, was the very heart of the monastic enterprise. And while there was an inescapable solitary dimension of the work, its true significance can only be grasped if it is placed with the social, communal reality in which the monastic project unfolded.^[1]

Christie goes on to make two further points about the monastic project. First, he notes that the inner journey of the monk unfolds “within a particular geographical landscape.”^[2] There is a relationship between inner life and exterior context. The environment in which the monk lives is not incidental to his or her practice, and vice-versa. Second, this practice, with its attendant rigor and self-sacrifice, is “for the sake of the larger community.”^[3] Personal integration and healing is related to a larger wholeness that is communal and even cosmic in scope.

This essay, and those to follow in this series, will examine the practices that support this ideal of integration and healing at all levels of life, with particular attention to the Life of Antony. What did the monks do to support their desire for wholeness? What might we learn from their experience? Is it possible to recover a sense of the world as paradise?

Before addressing these questions, a bit of historical context might be helpful. Primitive Christian monasticism took shape in the deserts of Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, and Syria in the 4^th and 5^th Centuries. It began, in part, as a kind of protest movement against the identification of the church with the state, whether pagan or Christian empire. In his City of God, written after the Goths had sacked Rome in 410, St. Augustine already had made a sharp distinction between ecclesial and secular authority. Augustine lived to see the collapse of Roman authority in North Africa, and died during the siege of Hippo. As Rowan Williams notes,

It is important to remember that Christian observance had only been made legal in 313, and did not become the official state religion until 389. The “Christian Empire” in the West was thus short-lived. The situation was different in the East, where the Byzantine Emperor continued to rule from Constantinople until it was conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

Thus, it was in the Eastern Empire that the monastic movement emerged among the peasantry of Egypt and Syria in resistance to the growing “worldliness” of the church. Christian discipleship could not be reduced to conformity to the culture of empire, and the spirituality of the desert mothers and fathers sought to preserve the eschatological tension between the “City of Man” and the “City of God.”^[5]

Scholars like Peter Brown attribute the rise of ascetic and monastic practice to the instability and uncertainty of the late Roman empire, as a response to the heavy social and economic obligations that made the search for a space of freedom on the margins of society seem appealing.^[6] We should not, however, mistake the response of the monks as merely escapist.

This is evident from the hagiography of the Desert Mothers and Fathers, foremost among them being the Life of Antony, attributed to Athanasius, the Patriarch of Alexandria. St. Antony of Egypt is considered the founder of desert monasticism, and we will turn to his paradigmatic life in a moment. That the desert monks were not simply escapist also is evident from the sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Verba Seniorum. In the preface to his translation of a collection of these sayings, Thomas Merton offers the following commentary:

The flight of these men to the desert was neither purely negative nor purely individualistic. They were not rebels against society. True, they were in a certain sense “anarchists,” and it will do no harm to think of them in that light. They were men who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a decadent state, and who believed that there was a way of getting along without slavish dependence on accepted, conventional values. But they did not place themselves above society. They did not reject society with proud contempt, as if they were superior to other men. On the contrary, one of the reasons why the fled from the world of men was that in the world men were divided into those who were successful, and imposed their will on others, and those who had to give in and be imposed upon. The Desert Fathers declined to be ruled by men, but had no desire to rule over others themselves. Nor did they fly from human fellowship – the very fact that they uttered these “words” of advice to one another is proof that they were eminently social. The society they sought was one where all men were truly equal, where the only authority under God was the charismatic authority of wisdom, experience, and love.^[7]

Again, the monastic ideal articulated by the Desert Fathers and Mothers was one of freedom. The Life of Antony provides a formative illustration of that ideal.

About the year 269, Antony, then about 18 years-old, underwent a conversion experience during the Eucharist in his village church in the Nile Valley when he heard the Gospel read, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”^[8] Taking this instruction to heart literally, Antony distributed the inheritance he’d received upon the death of his parents, and began to live a life of discipline, askesis, under the direction of an older neighbor living in solitude nearby. Such a life, a stricter observance of Christian practice within the local community, was not uncommon in Egypt and Syria at the time.^[9]

Actually, Antony’s conversion was more of a process than an event. As an orphan with responsibility for his younger sister, Antony initially kept back some money to care for her. Only later, again as a response to a Sunday Gospel reading – “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today,”^[10]– does Antony give all of his wealth away. He places his sister in a community of virgins, a parthenon, and moves to the cowshed below the garden of his former home.^[11]

At this stage, Antony has definitively renounced the normative social role of householder, as well as the social status and security it affords. He lives very simply, earning a subsistence income by weaving rope, mats, baskets and sandals from palm-blades and rushes. This was typical work for those devoted to ascetic practice, monotonous hand craft that freed the mind to focus on prayer.^[12]

What was it that Antony was doing alone in his room? Antony’s initiation into the monastic life is described near the beginning of the Life of Antony in this way: “He began to pay attention to himself.” Near the end of his life, Antony reportedly said to his disciples,

Clearly, paying attention, the practice of prosoche, was central to monastic ideal of freedom.^[13]

The acts of apotaxis (renunciation) and anachoresis (withdrawal) are not simply a rejection of the world, but also a proactive measure to create the conditions for intensive inner work. Antony, and those like him, sought to identify and let go of the preoccupations, fears, and fantasies that distracted them from awareness of the present moment. They sought to cleanse the lens of perception so that they could see themselves, the world, and God clearly and holistically, with what they called “purity of heart.” Only on this basis could they exercise authentic freedom.

The practice of prosoche then, requires a disciplined attention to one’s thoughts or logismoi. The Desert Mothers and Fathers were very psychologically astute observers, and they recognized that we tend to internalize certain attitudes and patterns of thinking that condition our responses to people and circumstances. We internalize the values of the ambient culture without much critical discernment. These logismoi inhibit our capacity to see and respond to reality.

Evagrios of Pontus, who along with John Cassian, was an important chronicler and theoretician of the teachings of the Desert Mothers and Fathers, developed a typology of the most challenging logismoi. The eight thoughts he enumerated are gluttony, fornication, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride.

It was critical that the monk learn to understand the precise source of these thoughts, how they worked to undermine his resolve and sense of purpose, even his identity in God . . . these logismoi could be so potent and so debilitating that unless the monk cultivated the ability to identify, scrutinize, and struggle against them, and even eventually to resolve them, prayer, knowledge of God, and life in community would become impossible.^[14]

Obviously, this inner work is a difficult struggle. It requires a combination of humility and vulnerability to becoming willing to acknowledge the wounded places within us that are in need of healing. It takes courage to open ourselves to the divine mercy that seeks to treat these wounds with tender compassion and forgiveness.

It is important to point out that the practice of prosoche is not primarily a technique for stress management or superficial pacification. It is, in fact, the distractions and preoccupations of our logismoi that make available to us the sometimes unconscious dimensions of the soul in need of healing. Vigils, fasts, lectio divina, the repetition of mantras like the Jesus prayer, sharing one’s thoughts with an elder, all the various techniques of prosoche are in the service of greater awareness: including, perhaps primarily, awareness of the logismoi that make us most uncomfortable and most resistant to the freedom that is our birthright.

The upwelling of such thoughts in the mind (or as the monks often imagined them, as attacks from the demons) could be utterly debilitating and demoralizing; but attending to them carefully also provides the monk with the opportunity to scrutinize the complex character of his desires and the wounded, anomalous places in his soul to which such thoughts appealed. Bringing these thoughts to conscious awareness and struggling to understand oneself in relationship to them could help to initiate a gradual transformation in which their particular power gradually dissipated and the mind could regain its own original freedom.^[15]

Antony practices prosoche for some fifteen years. This stage of his development comes to its climax when he removes himself to the cemetery outside of town and shuts himself inside one of the tombs. There, Antony engages in a decisive struggle with a multitude of demons that “whipped him with such force that he lay on the earth, speechless from the tortures. He contended that the pains were so severe as to lead one to say that the blows could not have been delivered by humans since they caused such agony.”^[16]

The exact nature of these pains is not explained, but there is a recognition of an agony of the soul that is a product of forces larger than the individual. What we are given is a profound image of a kind of death of the self. Antony is found unconscious in the tomb and taken to the village church, believed to be dead. When he wakes up, Antony insists on being taken back to the tomb to confront the enemy.

There his prayer is answered, and the demonic attacks are dispelled by the light of Christ. Antony complains to the Lord, “Where wast Thou? Why didst Thou not appear from the beginning to cease my pains? The Lord replied, “Antony, I was here: but I was waiting to see thy contest.”^[17] This dying leads to resurrection, but not without struggle. There is no healing without acknowledgement of woundedness and its attendant pain. The practice of prosoche, paying attention to our thoughts, reveals the cracks in our heart through which the light of Christ will shine.

The practice of prosoche is disciplined, hard-won self-knowledge for the sake of freedom. As we learn to pay attention to ourselves, with honesty and humility, we come to see reality differently; increasingly free from the filter of our attachments, fears and illusions. The return of paradise is, in part, a process of renewed perception. Paradise is already here, like Christ in the tomb with Antony. We can only see it, however, on the other side of the contest with our demons.

Still, this was only a beginning for Antony. The resolution of this struggle prepared Antony for the next stage of his development. In 285, he withdrew completely into the desert, locking himself in an abandoned fort. We will take up his story from there.

Share

Leave a comment

^[1] Douglas Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes For A Contemplative Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 44.

^[2] Christie, p. 45.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to Saint John of the Cross (Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 1990), p. 101.

^[5] Williams, pp. 102-103.

^[6] Christie, p. 44.

^[7] Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert (New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 1970), pp. 4-5.

^[8] Matthew 19:21.

^[9] Williams, pp. 104-105.

^[10] Matthew 6:34.

^[11] Derwas J. Chitty, The Desert A City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999), p. 2.

^[12] Chitty, p. 3.

^[13] Christie, p. 148.

^[14] Christie, p. 49.

^[15] Christie, p. 151.

^[16] Christie, pp. 47-48.

^[17] Chitty, p. 3.

Pascal’s well-known quote is frequently misunderstood. For him, the heart is not just a metaphor to describe our yearning for God, or the “seat” of emotions. Pascal is situated in a venerable lineage that understands the heart as an organ of spiritual perception, the center of our being that mediates our basic sense of “aliveness.” It senses pattern and coherence. It knows things, but not in the same way our intellect knows them.

What does it mean to say that the heart is an organ of spiritual perception?

Ruben Laukkonen, a neuroscientist and Buddhist practitioner, offers a helpful framework within which to answer this question. In a concise and brilliant essay, Laukkonen argues “that meaning, purpose, path, and synchronicity, are a cluster of basic human experiences that we receive when the channel between part and whole is open. They are top-down signals about what is ‘good’ in light of the broader reality you are embedded in.” He refers to these “signals” as “metacognitive gradients.”

Laukkonen’s argument begins with the observation that everything in nature is embedded in larger systems. At every level of being, the part is dependent upon the whole for its form and function. What is more, the part is continually exchanging information with the whole, in and through a holarchy of being in which larger wholes exert causal power over their parts. Consider, for example, that cells are embedded in organs, organs in organisms, organisms in ecosystems, ecosystems in biospheres.

“Plants and animals would not survive were they not in harmony with the dynamics of the forest. The context of the forest is always ‘speaking’ to its part (the top-down signal) through temperature gradients, seasonal rhythms, and ecological pressures.

The collective ephaptic fields in the brain synchronise neurons to generate a state of ‘meaning’ beyond single action potentials. Cells don’t know where to grow or replicate without being in tune with the global program of the body. And without the chemical gradients carved out by the prerogative of the higher-order, homeostatic pattern, disease ensues . . .

Just like the neuron depends upon the rest of the brain for meaningful action potentials, we depend upon these higher order signals in order to truly flourish. By analogy, we experience as meaning what the neuron ‘experiences’ as abundant energy, or ease of firing, in light of coherence with surrounding oscillations.”

We depend upon higher-order signals in order to flourish, even though the complexity of the larger systems in which we are embedded exceed our capacity to comprehend them. As Laukkonen wryly notes, “You can’t fit the universe inside of a brain.”

Human flourishing therefore requires trust in constraints and signals that we do not fully understand. So, relating to higher causal patterns demands faith: “a calibrated receptivity to top-down constraints under irreducible uncertainty. Faith is action guided by the ineffable.” The question is never whether you will live by faith. The question is whether you will do it unconsciously (scattered, defensive, incoherent) or consciously, with humility, in relationship to the larger field.

“Because the causal web that generates your life is vastly higher-dimensional than your local model of it, no bounded agent can fully derive the correct action from first principles. So the agent is forced to rely on something beyond complete understanding.”

This is a summary and paraphrase of a much more nuanced argument. I want to highlight two aspects of Laukkonen’s essay relevant to understand the heart as an organ of spiritual perception. The first is his insistence that we cannot deduce correct action from first principles through reason alone, because the complexity of the causal systems in which we are embedded exceeds our capacity to rationally model it. And yet, second, we do receive signals from “above” and align with them in ways that increase our sense of coherence and meaning. We can choose to become more “permeable” to those signals, as Laukkonen recommends – even if we don’t understand them rationally.

So, how is it that we receive these signals? What is this “something” that we can rely on beyond complete understanding?

Here, Pascal gives us a clue: the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. It is through the heart that we have access to first principles informing our action – not through deductive or inductive reason, our usual modes of cognition – but through the intuitive knowing of the heart. It is the gut reaction of conscience, just knowing what is the right thing to do. It is the inspiration of the artist or scientist or mystic, who knows more than they can know, communicating understanding that comes through them rather than from them.

This is the ancient, biblical understanding of the heart; not the sentimental heart of so many Valentine’s Day cards, but the heart as the integrative center of the human being. The Book of Proverbs, for example, is typical of the biblical view of the heart:

“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” (Prov. 4:32)

”As water reflects the face, so one’s life reflects the heart.” (Prov. 27:19)

In the Gospel of John, Jesus reflects this lineage when he says,

“The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” (John 4:14b).

“Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” (John 7:38).

Purity here is not so much a moral quality (although it includes that) as it is a quality of perception. It is about clarity of vision, attunement to higher orders of being from which we can receive information we need to live in cosmic alignment. The heart is like a radio receiver, wading through static to find the right frequency at which it can receive a clear signal. Jesus’ central message is that we need a change of mind/heart (metanoia), an upgrade to our consciousness so that we can perceive the divine presence and action (basileia tou theou), within us and between us. We need to wake up and tune in!

In this lineage, the heart - indeed, the physical heart – is understood (in contemporary terms) as a fractal, holographically united to the cosmic heart. Our hearts are not something that we have, so much as our participation in this resonant, radiant, mutual feedback loop between our hearts as a holograph of the divine heart – the whole cosmic energetic field. The heart is a holon of the sacred heart of Christ.

There are intriguing findings in contemporary neurobiology that appear to validate this ancient understanding of the heart. The heart is not a “mechanical pump” so much as it is an “electromagnetic generator” working simultaneously across a range of vibrational frequencies to perform its various tasks of self-regulation and information exchange (with intricate feedback loops connected to the brain and other parts of the body through neural networks and hormonal secretions, as well as em resonance).

The heart generates an electromagnetic (em) energy field that forms a torus extending 12-15 feet from the body, with the axis running through the length of the torso from the pelvic floor to the top of the skull. This torus is apparently holographic (any part within the torus contains the information of the whole field). Some scientists conjecture that all systems are toroid in form from the atomic to the universal level: one universal torus encompassing an infinite number of interacting holographic toroi within its spectrum. Heart – Earth – Solar System – we are embedded in a nested holarchy of toroid systems through which energy and information is exchanged.

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. Joseph Chilton Pearce argues that

“The heart certainly has an intelligence, though this calls for a new definition of the word to differentiate it from cerebral intellect. The hearts intelligence is not verbal or linear or digital, as is the intellect in our head, but rather is a holistic capability that responds in the interest of well-being and continuity, sending to the brain’s emotional system an intuitive prompt for appropriate behavior. Intellect, however, can function independently from the heart – that is, without intelligence – and can take over the circuitry and block our heart’s more subtle signals.”

Every heart is a perfect holograph of the cosmic heart, carrying within itself access to the information of the whole. The heart is fundamentally a homing beacon, allowing us to tune into the divine frequency; but the signals can get jammed by lower level noise. This is why purity of heart is a prerequisite for perceiving the higher-level signals.

I suggest that Christian contemplative tradition identified the heart as a receiver of “top-down constraints and signals” centuries ago. “Guard the heart” and “Bring the mind into the heart” are continual refrains in the Christian contemplative tradition. Contemplative practice is about becoming more permeable to the higher-order signals that Laukkonen recognizes.

How we respond to a stimulus determines which neural pathways are activated in our brain, and between our brain and our heart. Constriction activates the amygdala, setting into motion the fight/flight/freeze response. Release activates the frontal lobe, setting into motion our capacity for reflection, thinking and entrainment of brain and heart rhythms. This allows us to perceive more clearly and respond more freely, rather than simply reacting.

Christian meditation practices such as Centering Prayer are a method of metanoia, neurologically patterning the “mind of Christ” into our bodies. Centering Prayer is a means of re-wiring our brains to entrain them with the heart’s rhythm. It is a practice of continually surrendering, letting go, rather than clinging to our thoughts; releasing rather than constricting. Writes Cynthia Bourgeault: “Centering Prayer patterns into its practitioners what I would call the quintessential Jesus response: the meeting of any and all life situations by the complete free giving of one’s self.” Centering Prayer is kenosis, self-emptying, in meditation form. We reduce the noise of “self” so that we can clearly hear the “signals” from higher orders of being.

The climate crisis is an example of “signals” from the higher order of being in which we are embedded, indicating the need to take action to restore harmony, coherence, and stability in our planetary ecosystem. Our ability to receive the signals is not a function of reason alone, but of the heart’s permeability – its freedom from the noise of selfishness, fear, greed, and hatred that jams the signals. It is only with the bringing of the mind into the heart, the purification and integration of our perceptivity in relationship to the whole of which we are a part, that we can become entrained to the signals we are receiving from “above.”

It is with “the mind in the heart” that we can “surf the cosmic gradient” and tune-in to what the Spirit is saying.

Works Referenced

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice (Shambala Press, 2016)

Ruben Laukkonen, “Multiscale causality and the meaning crisis: How to surf the cosmic gradient to improve your life” posted on Sacred Basic Substack (January 26, 2026)

Jospeh Chilton Pearce, The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit (Park Street Press, 2004)

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Simple, perhaps; but not always easy.

We’ve made it harder than it needs to be, because our spiritual traditions – at least, the Christian traditions with which I am most familiar – have failed to help us raise our state of being. They have forgotten that this is their purpose. They have forgotten many of the spiritual technologies that help us to increase our state of being. They often marginalize and persecute those who do remember.

Christianity has traded “raising your state of being” for ideological conformity and institutional power. No wonder so many people are looking elsewhere for spiritual nurture.

What does it mean to “raise your state of being?” It means to enlarge your consciousness (metanoia), to increase your capacity to experience reality. This is often described today as “being present” – gathered, grounded, focused. It describes a quality of awareness. Jesus referred to it as being awake!

Jesus’ core teaching is that we can expand our consciousness, transcend our limited awareness, to perceive God’s presence and power within us and among us. “Raising our state of being” is about being able to see clearly, and transmit effortlessly, the divine energies at work within and around us.

The “higher” our state of being, the greater our capacity to perceive and work with these energies. In practical terms, we begin to understand people and circumstances, and to respond in ways that are aligned with divine wisdom and compassion. In the early Christian mystical tradition, this is referred to as theoria physikē – contemplation of the inner nature of things, the capacity to see and respond to what is here and now. The fruit of theoria physikē is agape – a love that desires the good of the other and, when necessary, becomes self-sacrificial for the sake of the good.

When agape becomes stabilized as our response to reality, we move into an even higher state of being, theoria theologikē – contemplation of God. The fruit of theoria theologikē is theosis – participation in the divine energies. We become so attuned to the wavelength at which God’s presence is intuited that we become a live transmitter of divine energy. When theosis becomes stabilized as our state of being, we become an aperture between the realms through which mercy flows to heal and renew the world.

This is the business of virtually all spiritual traditions, expressed in a Christian idiom. You can call it theosis or “putting on the mind of Christ” or being united with “the body of Christ.” It is about becoming open to our true nature as the image of God, an expression of the divine energies, which has been there all along if only we could see it and express it. If only we could wake-up!

So, how do we wake-up?

The basic foundation is askesis. It literally means “training” or “practice.” In early monastic traditions, training had several aspects. Cultivating self-awareness was the foundation. This involved learning to pay attention to one’s thoughts (logismoi in Greek) and recognizing the patterns of perception and response that we have internalized. This is a subtle practice of noticing the way energy arises in our body and is constellated as an emotion with corresponding ideas.

A simple example: my neck and shoulders tense, my heart rate increases, and my stomach is nauseous. I feel angry. My friend didn’t return my phone call. She is ignoring me and is rude. I begin to resent my friend and complain about her to my spouse.

Notice the progression of energetic stimulus, emotional labeling, and rationalization, and the resulting response: I become resentful and malign my friend’s behavior. This is the story I have told myself. Whether it conforms to reality at all, or is a helpful way to respond to what is happening, is another matter entirely.

Early monastic teachers recognized that our perceptual apparatus is often distorted by negative attitudes and limited by internalized prejudices; they called these disturbed reactions “passions.” Passions are negative emotional energies that become habituated responses to a distorted perceptions of reality. Evagrios of Pontus, one of the great spiritual psychologists of early monasticism, defined eight primary “thoughts” that disturb the soul: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride.

These passions are not simply passing feelings, but deeply ingrained lenses through which we perceive and respond to the world. In later tradition, they became combined in various ways as the “seven deadly sins.” But for the early monks, these passions were not “sins” per se – they were logismoi, thoughts that shaded our perception of reality and became the precondition for moral failings.

In the example I cited above, I might notice the tension in my body as a signal that I am disturbed before it becomes cathected as anger. The fact that my friend has not responded to my phone call can be observed with curiosity rather than with judgment. It may well be for some reason that has nothing to do with me! I can choose to forgo making assumptions. I can seek more information rather than gossiping about her. Whatever the reason may be for the unreturned call, it need not disturb my serenity. Ultimately, the energy arising within me can take a different form than anger, or simply be released.

When we are unaware of our emotional programming, and dissociated from our perceptual capacities (sensory, intuitive, and intellectual), we are, from a spiritual point of view, asleep. We react rather than act. We don’t see the whole picture. To wake up is to become aware of our programming and learn to integrate our perceptual capacities so that we can expand our consciousness.

The first objective of training is the recognition and deconstruction of our emotional and cultural programming. This is done through meditation and the practice of sharing one’s thoughts with an elder or spiritual guide. We don’t do it by ourselves. It requires help; which is why humility is an essential component of training. It is a process of identifying and externalizing our programming so that we can let go of our passions and move toward wholeness. We learn to see the passions as they arise, and allow them to pass without having to react to them. We cultivate apatheia, which is not “apathy” but rather freedom from distorted desires and negative reactivity.

Apatheia is the first step in upgrading our mode of consciousness so that it is generative of the virtues instead of the passions: justice, prudence, courage, temperance, faith, hope, and love. These are dispositions or habits that replace the passions, providing new containers to direct the energies that arise within us. They are the building blocks of discernment: the capacity to perceive and respond to reality in alignment with God’s will. We act our way into thinking differently.

Apatheia also is nurtured by participation in the sacramental life of the Church, ritual practice and prayer. Especially helpful are chanting the psalms, meditation on scripture, and physical disciplines (fasting, vigils, processions, prostrations, manual labor - hatha yoga if you will) that engage and unify our sensory, feeling, and intellectual capacities; bringing the mind into the heart. Waking-up is a full-body, integrative experience.

“Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” Apatheia purifies the heart, understood as an organ of perception; the integrated center of our capacity to see, attune, and entrain ourselves to the energy of the divine suffusing all of reality. Letting go of the passions and cultivating the virtues stabilizes our attention and supports our intention to raise our state of being.

We begin training with detoxing from our cultural blinders and distorted desires. The lens of perception then becomes clear and integrated so that we can perceive and respond to reality, rather than to our projections. We trade-in our “small mind” for “big mind,” the mind of Christ. As we begin operating on a much higher level of attunement to the divine, we become conscious of our participation in the divine energies and empowered to transmit them. We operate on God-sufficiency instead of self-sufficiency.

We no longer identify with what we see but with That Which Sees.

We become free.

We become love.

And that is the business of all spiritual traditions. It is as simple as that.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness. These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon, also known as Peter, and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him.

These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. – Matthew 9:35-10:8 (New Revised Standard Version)

I am fortunate that the sermons at the parish church I attend are usually of a very high quality. This past Sunday, the Gospel text was the above passage from Matthew, appointed for the 3^rd Sunday after Pentecost, and was the focus of the sermon. There were two elements of the sermon that have stayed with me: an interpretation and an observation.^[1] Each provides a point of departure for my own reflection on the text.

First, the interpretation. The preacher interpreted the harvest to which Jesus refers as a “harvest of pain.” What? I must confess that my mind wandered for a while contemplating what this might mean. This is not a traditional reading of the image of the harvest. Typically, it is thought to refer to a harvest of souls needing salvation, or a harvest of new church members requiring evangelization.

Without dismissing these possible meanings (which, however well-intentioned, can reduce people to commodities in the spiritual marketplace), the sermon stayed closer to the immediate context of the passage. Jesus is responding with compassion to human suffering, and he identifies the need for fellow laborers to help him tend to this plentitude of pain. He instructs his disciples to pray for laborers to assist with this work.

“Harvesting pain” means responding to suffering with compassion.

Second, the observation. The preacher noted that Jesus follows this instruction to pray with an immediate commissioning of his disciples to be the laborers for whom they are praying. Be careful what you pray for! The point seems to be that the disciples are the answer to their prayer. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Being a disciple of Jesus is first and foremost about walking alongside people in their struggles, and sharing the power to love and to heal which is God’s gift to us. Solidarity and compassion are the hallmarks of discipleship.

Praying for laborers means becoming laborers.

What does it mean to labor with Jesus in harvesting the pain of the world?

The key is “compassion.” In contemplating its meaning, I recall a fascinating exegetical note on this passage by Paul Nuechterlein. Neuchterlein observes that the Greek word for “compassion,” splagchnizomai, is a noun that originally referred to the inner organs of the sacrificial victim that were removed during a ritual blood sacrifice. Later, it became a generic word for the inner organs, including the womb, which were associated with the seat of negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, or distorted desire. The verb form of the word meant to eat the inner organs of the victim, or use them for divination. In early Greek literature, it was never used to mean compassion or mercy.

It was only in later Jewish writings, such as the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures), that splagchna began to be used to translate Hebrew words that referred to the seat of the emotions in a positive sense; it indicated a visceral response – having one’s inner organs stirred up – of mercy or compassion. David Bentley Hart retains this Jewish sense in his translation of the Greek text of Matthew 9:36: “he [Jesus] was inwardly moved with compassion for them.”^[2] In fact, Neuchterlein notes that the verbal form, splagchnizomai, attained a special usage in the Synoptic Gospels, always used to describe either an emotion of Jesus, or the compassionate response of a major character in a parable told by Jesus.

This is a remarkable trajectory: from a word used to describe the disordered, impulsive passions that drive the making of sacrificial victims, to a word used to describe the compassionate feelings that drive the healing of victims. This linguistic change is emblematic of a spiritual transfiguration: learning to integrate our disordered passions into compassion, so that we stand in solidarity with victims rather than participate in their violation.

Pause for a moment, to contemplate the disordered passions – hatred, greed, envy, rivalry, prejudice, malice – that are the driving force of so much of our common life today. Contemplate the many victims of this disordered desire. What a harvest of pain! The laborers truly are too few. Are we prepared to be disciples of Jesus, alchemical agents of divine mercy transforming passion into compassion, pain into promise?

If so, then we have our own inner work to do; but this work is not an end in itself. It isn’t just for our benefit. It is for the purpose of making us usable for God in the healing of others. Jesus gives his disciples power to heal. He gives them the power to transform passion into compassion, beginning within ourselves and then working out into the world.

The giving of this power is, it seems to me, closely related to the nearness of the “kingdom of heaven.” It is an infusion of energy from another dimension of reality, a higher order of consciousness that operates under a different set of constructual givens (the kingdom) than our phenomenal world (earth). The power from this realm cures the sick, gives life to the dead, welcomes the outcast, and liberates those who are bound by evil forces.

The language of “kingdom” or “realm” also underscores the communal and systemic nature of discipleship. It is not only about healing individuals, but also about challenging the structures of sacrificial violence that create victims in the first place. Are we willing to become so many cracks in the edifice of empire through which the kingdom of heaven can transmit its healing power?

In the face of the evil of earthly empires, Jesus invites us is to claim a different citizenship altogether, with a very different set of loyalties to a very different kind of power. That is why disciples can expect persecution from religious and political authorities, who benefit from the cult of sacrificial violence.^[3]

Disciples live at the intersection between these two realms, infusing divine mercy and compassion into our broken world. This power is a divine gift – it comes through us, not from us. “You received without payment; give without payment.”^[4] Borrowing from the teaching of George Gurdjieff, Cynthia Bourgeault describes the work of discipleship in terms very similar to Jesus. This work involves conscious labor and intentional suffering.

“Conscious labor” is the intentional effort to stay present to reality. It is a quality of attention and aliveness that refuses the evasions of denial, illusion, and ideology, and resists the entropy of mechanical or compulsive reactivity. Jesus calls it metanoia.^[5] It is having “the mind of Christ.”^[6]

“Intentional suffering” is the decision to willingly embrace suffering, to move toward it rather than avoid it. It is the free act of meeting pain with compassion for the sake of the common good. As Bourgeault notes, this is not “the useless and completely avoidable suffering caused by the frustration of our neurotic programs and illusions . . . To qualify as upwardly transformative work, the offering must be pure (free of personal gain or self-interest); it must be spacious(nonurgent and unattached to outcome); and it must be generous (offered on behalf of the larger whole).”^[7] Jesus calls it agape.^[8]

Bourgeault recognizes that intentional suffering is a very high practice, bearing the energy of Christic or bodhisattva consciousness. It is the act of self-emptying or kenosis that allows divine mercy to flow through us. To paraphrase St. Paul, having the mind of Christ is manifest as self-emptying so that we become usable for God’s good purpose. ^[9]

If this sounds impossible, that is because it is; under our own steam, at least. It is truly God’s power at work through us: an infusion of compassion from another realm altogether. We can only practice becoming open to this divine infusion.

And we can start small. Jesus commissions his disciples to begin where they are: “go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”^[10] It is only later, in the light of Jesus supreme act of kenosis, that they are given a larger commission to make disciples of all nations.^[11] So it is with us. We begin in our families and communities, expanding the circle of agape as we learn to bear our share of the global pain harvest; transforming suffering into joy, bringing life out of death.

We reap the harvest of pain in our own backyard. Then, out of the alchemy of compassion and pain, we can make an offering of agape for the healing of the world. We can meet the entropy of sacrificial violence with the counter-entropic force of sacrificial love.

When we do, the kingdom of heaven draws very near indeed, renewing the face of the earth.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

^[1] This reflection is based on my memory of the sermon delivered by the Rev’d Iain Bendry, July 14, 2026 at St. George’s Anglican Church, Lisbon.

^[2] David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 17.

^[3] Matthew 10:16-18.

^[4] Matthew 10:8.

^[5] Matthew 4:17.

^[6] Philippians 2:5. See also I Corinthians 2:14-16.

^[7] Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm (Boulder: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2020), p. 54-55.

^[8] Matthew 22:39. See also John 5:13.

^[9] Philippians 2:5-13.

^[10] Matthew 10:6.

^[11] Matthew 28:19.

One of the benefits of praying the Daily Office is that I am exposed to a broad range of scripture, which often proves to have surprisingly direct applicability to my life; not always or invariably, but usually and precisely. As one of my teachers, Sister Rose Mary Dougherty, observed, all scripture is autobiographical. A passage which may seem to have little relevance at one stage of life, may provide great insight at another point in the life cycle.

This was the case when I read the passage above from Ecclesiastes earlier this week. I was convicted immediately by its message. In the past year, I have spent far too much time listening to the ravings of a ruler among fools. I have allowed him to capture my attention and disturb my serenity. The commentary on his ravings, even the critical ones, seem to delight in the outrage it generates and only serves to increase the volume. None of the shouting reflects much thinking – it is all shibboleths and tired repetition of clichés. In the process, I learn nothing new and am diverted from listening to the quiet words of the wise that actually are instructive.

This is an example of the general pattern of the dominance of loud (often, male) voices. It requires some effort to seek out and listen to the quiet words of the wise. At the very least, we have to step outside of the “news” cycle. I finally even cancelled my subscription to The New York Times, choosing instead to pay attention to the patient voices of independent, long-form investigative journalism, history, and philosophy. Much wisdom is found in the quiet reading (and re-reading) of voices, past and present, offering context and perspective for our interpretation of the signs of the times.

In a similar way, I find it helpful to focus on the calm words of the wise in my circle of relationships. It is usually the quietest voices that express the deepest wisdom; free from cant, indifferent to ambition, allergic to coercion. Such wisdom can be found in people of any age or condition, but time does play a factor in its deepening and mellowing. I have often benefited from the experience of the elders in my community, often people who no longer have anything to prove or protect. This is often the case of people on the social margins as well. They are free to speak the truth in love.

Whatever the case, the words of the wise are generally quiet because they emerge from a profound interior silence, a practice of listening to one’s inner voice – call it conscience or God. We can recognize the words of the wise as wise, because they resonate within the silent depths of our own heart. They are the fruit of personal integration and transformation, attuning the heart to a static-free transmission of divine wisdom that grounds us in reality and inoculates us against the viruses of delusion and fantasy.

To hear the quiet words of the wise, we have to listen with both ears: one ear attuned to the neighbor and one ear attuned to ourselves – the voices without and the voices within. Prayer and meditation are methods of cultivating this capacity to listen and discern between wisdom and folly. Whatever God’s will may be, it is always discovered through embracing reality.

It is not enough, however, to listen to the quiet words of the wise. Scripture instructs us to “heed” them – to internalize and enact them in our lives. Truth is a lived reality, not merely an abstract theory. Refusing to listen to the shouting of a ruler among fools does not mean simply covering our ears and ignoring the ruler’s folly. His folly has grave consequences for the common good, unleashing great destruction. Wisdom instructs us on how to live in a world where fools continue to shout and wield the weapons of war.

Listen to the quiet ones teaching us wisdom; not only with their words, but also by the quality of their lives. Their quiet wisdom is accompanied by a quiet courage. It is in the face of such courage that foolish rulers tremble and shout all the louder.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

^[1] Ecclesiastes 9:17-18 (NRSV)

“I want to go deeper in my spiritual life.”

I have a young friend here in Lisbon who expressed this to me the other day. I have heard some version of this desire expressed by many people over the years; often, by faithful Christians who feel “stuck” in their spiritual development. They are active in their congregation, regularly receive the Blessed Sacrament, and have a personal prayer life. They serve on countless committees, serving others inside and outside the church.

But something is missing. This “something” is expressed as a vague desire for a deeper relationship with God. “What else do I need to do?” they wonder.

More recently, I also hear this sentiment expressed by people without any formal religious background. They may have explored a variety of religious traditions and practices, like my young friend, and find themselves still feeling restless and dissatisfied. The want to have a spiritually meaningful life, but are not sure how.

They, too, wonder what they should do.

Perhaps, that is the wrong question to ask. I’m not questioning the authenticity of their longing. It is genuine and it expresses an innate desire for God. We all experience a transcendent longing for the infinite, an intuition that the fulfillment of our human nature is found in union with the divine. The potential for our fulfillment is an intrinsic part of our nature.

We all have the potential. What we lack is the power to realize it.

We are powerless to fulfill the longing for God that is our deepest desire. We are powerless to realize our full humanity. We are powerless to reveal the image of God in which we are created.

We are powerless. There is nothing we can “do” to go deeper in our spiritual life. There is not another retreat to attend, or book to read, or ascetic regimen to follow, or ritual to perform. When we have done all these things and still find our longing dissatisfied, we can only accept, with all humility, that we are powerless.

This is a deeply unsettling truth to accept.

We distrust powerlessness because it renders us vulnerable to harm, and too many people have been exploited and abused when they were powerless to protect themselves. They have good reason to distrust powerlessness and seek to avoid it at all costs.

We are taught that dependency is something we should outgrow. Maturity equals self-sufficiency. Powerlessness is a form of failure.

We even can idolize power and confuse power with truth. We believe that truth is defined by whoever has the power to enforce belief. We seek to exercise such power or at least identify with it to feel secure.

In the face of power as coercion, power as oppression, power as propaganda, the last thing we want to accept is powerlessness. So let me be very clear. I am not saying that we are altogether powerless, or that there are not legitimate expressions of power. What I am saying is something very specific: we do not have the power to satisfy our longing for the infinite; our desire for God, who alone can fulfill our human nature.

Spiritual maturity begins then, with a humble admission of powerlessness. It doesn’t, however, end there. It is simply the necessary prerequisite to become willing to receive the power that God can provide. We can receive the power that God inspires. That is the good news. But it isn’t a matter of our doing anything. It is a matter of our believing or trusting that God is doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

God already has fulfilled our humanity in Jesus Christ. The Incarnation is the revelation of the imago Dei in every human being, and the mediation of the power we need to realize it. What in Christian tradition is called theosis or divinization means the reception of the divine power that makes us fully human.

When someone says, “I want to go deeper in my spiritual life,” what I hear is an invitation to accept one’s powerlessness and become empty enough to receive God’s power. It is an invitation, not to do more, but to trust more; to surrender self-sufficiency and become open to receive all the good things that God desires to give us.

With God’s power, we become able to protect the powerless by hedging human vulnerability round with communities of care.

With God’s power, we become mature, not by being self-sufficient, but by receiving and sharing wisdom and love.

With God’s power, we perceive the truth as reality rather than as the projection of fantasies of security and control.

“Going deeper” is not a matter of doing more, but of being less self-preoccupied so that there is more space for God’s power to work through us. It will not make us “better” or more “successful” people. It will not fill us with more stuff – be it riches, honor, or prestige. It will strip is of everything that prevents us from being transparent to Love. That is what God’s power looks like in a human being – a radiant love that is truly life-giving.

The power of God will not protect us from our vulnerability – anymore than it protected Jesus. It will make our vulnerability a sacrificial offering for the healing of the world, an aperture through which divine love continues to create and recreate, reconcile and make all things new – in solidarity with Jesus’ sacred humanity.

Humbly accepting our powerlessness can lead to humbly receiving God’s power, if we are willing to entrust ourselves to God.

We may very well need to do less, to become more; to know less, to trust more; to achieve less, to love more.

^[1] Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956), p. 83.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

I generally don’t write much about current politics these days; at least, not directly. This is, in part, because I do not have much of value to add to the endless reams of commentary available already; but also because I am more interested in the “Kingdom of God” that is within us and between us.^[3] Jesus is clear that his Kingdom is not of this world. In this world, the divine takes the form of the Crucified One. Thus, following the way of Jesus is not a program for electoral – or any other kind of worldly – success. Jesus “wins” by “losing,” and so do we.

If we are looking for God to guarantee our political success, however righteous our program may be, we have confused God with an idol. This is because divine authority is not a matter of coercion. It is an invitation to embody truth, beauty, and goodness in the world; to realize the imago Dei in which we are created.

God governs the world by authority, and not by force. If this were not so, there would be neither freedom nor law int the world; and the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer (Pater Noster): “Sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua sicut in caelo et in terra”, would lose all meaning. He who prays these petitions does so solely with the purpose of affirming and increasing divine authority and not divine power. The god who is almighty – not virtually but actually – has no need at all to be petitioned that his reign may come and that his will be done. The meaning of this prayer is that God is powerful only in so far as his authority is freely recognised and accepted. Prayer is the act of such recognition and acceptance. One is free to be believing or unbelieving. Nothing and no one can compel us to have faith – no scientific discovery, no logical argument, no physical torture can force us to believe, i.e. to freely recognise and accept the authority of God. But on the other hand, once this authority is recognised and accepted, the powerless become powerful. Then divine power can manifest itself – and that is why it is said that a grain of faith is sufficient to move mountains.^[4]

Here, the “anonymous” author of this quote, Valentin Tomberg, is making an important distinction between “authority” and “power.” Power, in the form of violence or compulsion, does not and cannot establish authority. Authority is established by its truth, beauty, and goodness. It operates by attraction rather than compulsion. Where divine authority is recognized, God is almighty and power is manifest as love. Where this authority is denied or usurped, God is crucified and love becomes sacrificial.

God is the ultimate authority, and human authority exists in virtue of participation in the truth, beauty, and goodness of God through a process of self-emptying that makes space for divine power to manifest. Then the Kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven! This is what Jesus announced and practiced. When divine authority was recognized, miracles occurred (your faith has made you well).^[5] Where divine authority was not recognized, he could do nothing;^[6]eventually, those who rejected divine authority reduced him to nothing. Manifest God’s authority, and prepare to be crucified.

This is a matter of experience verified, perhaps most strikingly, by millions of alcoholics and addicts who recognize a power greater than themselves as the source of their recovery. They are powerless over their addiction, but by recognizing and making space for divine authority they discover a power that forgives, heals, and renews them. Manifest God’s authority, and the powerless become powerful (in a wholly different key).

What is crucial to understand is that authority and (coercive) power are not identical, which means that truth, beauty, and goodness are not identical with (coercive) power. As Tomberg, recognized, this is the tragic error of modernity and post-modernity.

It is the dogma or philosophical principle which states that truth and power are identical; that which is powerful is true and that which is powerless is false. According to this dogma or philosophical principle (which has become that of modern technological science) power is the absolute criterium and supreme ideal of truth. Only that which is powerful is of the Divine.^[7]

This dogma that power is truth has profoundly evil consequences when a political leader aspires to be a “superman” figure embodying it. History is replete with examples; Donald Trump is only the latest in a long line of usurpers of legitimate authority. He is worshiped as a superman figure, employs deceit, corruption, and violence to secure his power, and believes that his word is truth simply because he has the power to enforce it. He truly believes, and has persuaded others, that he is “Don Colossus;” the gold-leaf idol erected at Trump National Doral Miami, which will eventually be located at his presidential library.^[8]

This monstrosity – embodying everything that is false, ugly, and decadent about his reign – was created by sculptor Alan Cottrill. The worship of this idol of power, however offensive and dangerous, is ultimately a monument to the banality, sterility, and treachery of evil. It reveals the infantile narcissism of its subject.

What is truly disturbing, however, are religious leaders, who bless this idol and worship a god in Trump’s image. It is bad enough when a human being confuses power and truth in the attempt to become superman. Much worse are those who project this confusion on to God. Tomberg describes them well:

. . . Their faith in God depends only on the power of God; if God were powerless, they would not believe in him. It is they who teach that God has created souls predestined to eternal damnation and others predestined to salvation; it is they who make God responsible for the entire history of the human race, including its atrocities. God they say, “chastises” his disobedient children by means of wars, revolutions, tyrannies and other similar things. How could it be otherwise? God is almighty, therefore all that happens is only able to happen through his action or with his content.

The idol of power has such a hold on some human minds that they prefer a God who is a mixture of good and evil, provided that he is powerful, to a God of love who governs only by intrinsic authority of the Divine – by truth, beauty and goodness – i.e. they prefer a God who is actually almighty to the crucified God.^[9]

Since God is both almighty (for and through those who consent to divine authority) and, at the same time, crucified (by those who reject divine authority), resistance to evil means “losing” in terms of the dynamics of coercive power. The power of love operates at an entirely different level and is transmitted across an entirely different bandwidth of consciousness.

In a sense, there is no “resisting” evil. There is simply manifesting truth, beauty and goodness – regardless of whether it is politically successful or even safe. This requires what Tomberg refers to as “a certain niveau of consciousness. And it is the practice of spiritual exercises which safeguards this.”^[10]

Manifestations of truth, beauty, and goodness, in practice, are expressed in a variety of ways. It might be a dramatic commitment to truth at any cost, evidenced by Alisa Valdes-Rodriquez, whose courageous investigative journalism exposed Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch human trafficking network in New Mexico as part of a multinational intelligence kompromat operation actively protected by Democrats and Republicans. In so doing, she did not talk about sin in generalities. She gave names and addresses.^[11] She recently had to flee the United States.

It also can be expressed as a simple act of kindness, however inconvenient. A friend of mine arrived late to a meeting with me, and apologized for the delay. On his way to our meeting, he had encountered an elderly woman needing assistance with her grocery bags and stopped to help. “You’d be surprised how much you can learn about someone’s health status in 15 minutes!” he reported. Recognizing and addressing the need of the neighbor is the sin qua non of goodness.

In the face of the megalomaniacal kitsch of recent White House “renovations” and creations such as Don Colussus, continuing to create and honor real beauty is a manifestation of divine glory. It is the primary means of keeping us human and connected to reality. Beauty inspires awe, and awe is the foundation of wisdom. It is inseparable from truth and goodness. It is the doorway into the Kingdom. Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.^[12]

We do not resist evil so much as we refuse to collaborate with it, and manifest the Kingdom of God instead; what His Holiness Pope Leo XIV describes as “the civilization of love”:

The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization. For this reason, it is worthwhile pausing to reflect on some aspects of how we, each in our own way, can cooperate in building the civilization of love.^[13]

When we see evil, name it. Refuse to collaborate with it. Manifest the civilization of love instead. We can do this individually, and we can do it collectively.

Where do you see the civilization of love arising in your life? How are you contributing to it, one small act at a time? With whom are you doing it?

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

^[1] Ephesians 5:11.

^[2] Quoted in George Kimmich Beach, “The Prophetic Theology of James Luther Adams,” James Luther Adams Foundation, published September 29, 2022.

^[3] Luke 17:21.

^[4] Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism (New York: Penguin Group, Inc., 1985), p. 80. The anonymous author was revealed, post mortem, to be Valentin Tomberg.

^[5] See Mark 5:34, 10:52; Luke 17:19.

^[6] Mark 6:5.

^[7] Anonymous, p. 81.

^[8] Shawn Patrick Connelly, “Don Colossus: On gold statues and prayer circles,” posted at Drink Wisely – Pouring Over Theology and Truth on May 11, 2026.

^[9] Anonymous, p. 82.

^[10] Anonymous, p. 92.

^[11] Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, see her series of articles on the Epstein class posted at “The Pugilist with Alsa Valdes-Rodriquez.”

^[12] Psalm 96:9.

^[13] His Holiness Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (213).

I don’t read enough poetry. This is surely a limiting condition on my capacity to write and to think; it may be a moral failing as well. Anything that limits our capacity for imagination is a barrier to spiritual growth. Poetry is like oxygen for the imagination; depriving myself of it can induce a kind of spiritual dyspnea. So, I am grateful whenever someone shares a poem with me.

A dear friend asked me the other day if I was familiar with W. S. Merwin. I was shocked to discover that I was! Given that Merwin is one of the most celebrated American poets, it should not have been such a surprise. Nevertheless, it made me feel quite literary for about five seconds. I recalled the one Merwin poem that I knew, “Thanks.”

My friend doubled my knowledge of Merwin’s oeuvre by reciting from memory another of his poems. I have been sitting with it since then.

“For the Anniversary of My Death” by W.S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

The poem is a meditation on death. At least, that is what the title indicates. As the opening line reminds us, we do not know the date of our death. We pass by it each year, ignorant of its significance. I have passed the day 59 times now. How many more years of blessed unknowing are left to me before the date becomes the anniversary?

I do not know.

Merwin imagines the occasion to be like the death of a star, in which our silence will continue like the light of a dead sun seen thousands of years after its demise: a “Timeless traveler.” If the universe is infinite, does that mean our silence echoes through eternity? When the last fires wave to me, will “my” silence carry on like the beam of a lightless star?

I do not know.

But I wonder. What dies and what remains?

And I wonder, too, if contemplative prayer is even now like the banking of the flames, allowing me to enter into that silence before the fire’s final wave. If silence is a timeless traveler, I already have begun the journey.

Is this what Jesus meant when he said we have to die before we die? Lose our life in order to gain it? Become the beam of light?

I do not know.

But I wonder. Is eternal life now?

Merwin muses about the difference between then and now, between the anniversary of our death and our present unknowing of it. If life as we experience it is “a strange garment,” will death fit us for new, yet somehow less strange, clothing? When this body wears out like a garment, will God change it like clothing, along with the earth and heavens?^[1] What will “my” silent beam of light be wearing? Or will I stand naked before the Mystery?

I do not know.

But I wonder along with the poet and the psalmist (another poet); and, I suspect, you, dear reader.

If the earth and (in my case) the love of one man, and the shamelessness of so many others has been a surprise – and they have – will this strange garment give way to more familiar garb?

I do not know.

But today, I can hear the construction workers on Rua das Trinas, and the return of the swallows after their winter sojourn, and the cawing of the sea gulls to their comrades on the Tejo river. The fires are still burning, even if not as brightly as they once did.

And there is the silence – the Mystery – that familiar place that is like coming home, before which I, too, bow.

On this Ascension Day, there is much that I do not know. But this “timeless traveler” trusts that wherever the journey takes me, Jesus has prepared a place for us so that where he is, we may be also.^[2]

Trusting this, I can live today as if it were my anniversary.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

^[1] Psalm 102:25-26.

^[2] John 14:30.

Let us rejoice and give thanks: we are not only made Christians, but made Christ. (Homily on John 21.8) - Saint Augustine of Hippo

In my short time living in Portugal, I am increasingly aware that this is a Catholic country. Although fewer than 20% of the population attends mass weekly, 80% of the population identifies as Catholic (the percentage is much lower among young adults). Participation in the rites and sacraments of the Church is still very much a part of life here: baptism, first communion, confirmation, marriage, and Christian burial remain important.

The ringing of church bells can be heard marking the time throughout the day, and major processions such as the Feast of Corpus Christi are broadcast on public speakers in the central squares of Lisbon. Local saints are celebrated with gusto, if not devotion: St. Anthony of Lisbon requires most of the month of June to be properly feted with music, dancing, and feasting. The winding streets of Madragoa, our neighborhood in Lisbon, are filled with people of all ages from evening to early morning during the Santos (Saints) Festival.

One could see this as simply the lingering vestiges of a dying Catholic culture. I prefer to view it as a continuing hunger for communion, a profound desire for connection and participation in the life of the world; indeed, in the very life of God. This longing may not be consciously explicated, but it is implicitly present. It is deeply communal and reverences our intrinsic belonging to one another and to the divine Source. It represents a kind of “ordinary” mysticism; by this I mean a recognition of, and immersion in, the mystery of Being as it unfolds in our everyday existence.

This communion, this connection, is celebrated with joy. It makes life meaningful and delightful. It is the foundation of our existential security, and everything else in life is subordinated to it. Life is life together, and relationship is valued above everything else. It is more important than work, or money, or even pleasure. It can encompass suffering, because that, too, is shared.

Life is communion and tears: both tears of joy and tears of sorrow.

This became strikingly apparent to me during the celebration of our neighbor Lourenço’s first communion, along with 65 of his 3^rd grade classmates. We gathered on a Saturday morning at the beautiful Basilica da Estrela. The new communicants were robed in alb and cincture, adorned with a simple wooden pectoral cross. They were vested as liturgical ministers, underscoring their significance as the focal persons of the rite.

The children processed into the church accompanied by one of their godparents, who held the child’s lighted baptismal candle. Since most of the children were baptized as infants, this means that their families held on to these candles for 8 years in anticipation of this moment. I was touched to see how Lourenço’s godfather kissed his forehead as he left him at his seat with his classmates. It is notable that the godparents occupied this role, not the parents. It is a subtle but telling reminder that the children are part of a larger community than their immediate family, and that the communion in which they participate is deep and broad; it encompasses the whole world.

The first reading was the story of the priest Eli’s devotion to Samuel, the boy entrusted to his care. Eli helped Samuel to recognize God’s voice and develop his relationship with God. Psalm 23 assured us of God’s love, and the second reading from the First Letter of John reminded us that our relationships with each other should reflect God’s love for us. The Gospel of John was the story of the feeding of the 5,000 – the miracle of community and communion based on reciprocal feeding. Life is shared life, and in Christ we share in the divine life.

This is the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Communion. God becomes human in Christ so that, united with Christ, we may share in the divine life. By God’s grace we are given the power to realize the dignity of our nature, which makes us one with all things in heaven and on earth. God nourishes us with his love, and we nourish each other in love. This is the mystery of the Holy Trinity, of the divine life that is itself a relationship of love poured out into the created world and drawing us together in the life of love.

The Sacrament of Holy Communion trains us to perceive the divine presence in all things; to see the energy of love animating all of life. The new communicants were being initiated into this mystery at a deeper level; to receive more fully and thankfully the gift of life as life together.

This suggests to me a recognition of the significance of the children coming to an age at which they can consciously recognize and affirm their dignity as bearers of the imago Dei. For them, this first communion is a momentous occasion. Some of the parents reported that their kids had trouble sleeping the night before, or refused breakfast. They were too excited and awe struck to eat or sleep; even a little fearful. It is no small thing to recognize the enormity of your dignity as a child of God, and the responsibility to love that dignity entails.

Communion and tears. That is what I experienced at the Basilica da Estrela as the children sang this Song of Thanksgiving after receiving the Blessed Sacrament:

Jesus, truly present here
I ask You for a little more faith and humility.
And so, that I may be worthy to share
With You the deepest miracle of love.

A miracle of love so infinite
In which You, my God, become
So small and so humble
To enter into me.

Miracle of love so infinite
In which You, my God, forget
Your glory and Your power
For my sake.

Today I come full of joy
To receive You in this Eucharist.
I thank You because You want me at Your altar;
Even though it is small, You come into my soul.

Thank You, Lord, for this communion.

The Mystery of the infinite Love that constitutes our life together – that is the “ordinary” mysticism of everyday life that we experience and, in those moments in which we are conscious of it, evokes our deepest gratitude.

Following mass, we gathered with Lourenço’s family and friends for a blessedly typical five-hour Portuguese lunch, where we continued to reciprocally feed on the infinite love that nourishes us.

Thank You, Lord, for this communion.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Last month I celebrated my 59^th birthday, and marked one year of living in Lisbon. Reflecting on the past year, one of the things that I notice most is my relationship to my body. A year spent traversing Lisbon’s hills will draw attention to the matter!

Frankly, for most of my life I have taken my body for granted, treating it as an instrument (but not one that I bothered to keep in tune). I ignored, minimized, and neglected required maintenance. Care for my body was not prioritized. The mind and spirit were what I valued.

It was only very gradually, and very recently, that I came to understand, experientially, that all the dimensions of my existence – body, mind, and spirit – are profoundly interrelated. In the meantime, my body kept tabs, and the bill is now due.

In the past, I told myself that I simply didn’t have time to attend to my body. Now that I am retired, I don’t have that excuse. The present challenge is not time, but ignorance. I am not well acquainted with my body. I have not paid much attention to it, and am not attuned to its messages – unless it speaks REALLY loudly. Pain, I hear loud and clear! But my body shouldn’t have to shout to be heard. And my response needs to be more than simply trying to get it to “shut up.”

I’m beginning to appreciate my body’s complexity and subtlety, and to learn how to listen to it. One of the things I’m realizing is that the body has its own way of knowing, its own form of intelligence. There is a kind of kinesthetic knowing through movement, posture, holding, releasing, vibrating, etc. In me, it is woefully underdeveloped, but it is there.

The simplest way that I connect with this knowing is through posture and sound. There are truths that are encoded in the body. Humility, for example, is not simply a mental attitude, it is inscribed energetically through the posture of kneeling or prostrating. Surrender is experienced by lying on the ground or floating in water, activating the energy of trust. Yoga poses open energetic pathways within and between bodies. Chanting the psalms, rather than saying them, brings me into alignment with a wholly different vibrational frequency; so, too, with communal song and dance.

The body, and not only the brain, is a receiver and transmitter of information within larger holographic energy fields. If I am not attuned to my body, I remain unaware of my profound connection to reality and the information that is communicated through the exchange of energy. I also leave a lot of power on the table.

Attention to the body as part of one’s spiritual practice is vital because it is within and through the body that energy, in all its forms from the most gross to the most subtle, is metabolized. How much divine energy can the body metabolize without overloading the system? In what ways does divine energy transfigure the body? Is it possible to inhabit our “spiritual body” before we die (I Corinthians 15)? What is the relationship between the physical body and the spiritual body?

The New Testament witness has a much different view of bodies than we post-moderns. There was widespread agreement across the Hellenistic world (Jewish, Christian, and Pagan) that the physical body is limited – it is temporary, subject to decay and death. But there also was widespread agreement that there are other kinds of bodies – far more subtle and eternal – for which we are being fitted. The resurrection body of Jesus is a good example. The body of Jesus in its ascended form is yet another.

As David Bentley Hart notes,

The common belief of most educated persons of the time was that, if any reality was bodiless in the absolute sense, it could be only God or the highest divine principle. Everything else, even spirits, had some kind of body, because all of them were irreducibly local realities . . . it was widely believed in late antiquity that, in human beings, flesh and soul and spirit were all present to some degree; “spirit” was merely the element that was imperishable by nature and constitution.^[1]

Here, I should add that “flesh” is understood to be the material body – flesh and blood. “Soul” is the animating principle of bodily life, the psychical “substance” that endows the material body with movement and growth. This life is temporary and mutable. It is passing away. “Spirit” indicates the dimension of life that is eternal and can move freely between the earthly and heavenly realms. All three were thought of as a kind of element, in some sense embodied and capable of extension; all are “natural,” constitutive of what it means to be human.^[2] We have more than one body.

So, when St. Paul speaks of the resurrection, he does so in terms of eternal life in a spiritual body, distinct from but continuous with finite life in a physical body. This idea is expressed in the Preface of the Commemoration of the Dead in the Burial Office, which says that “For your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; and when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place eternal in the heavens.”^[3] The change to our life commences, however, before we die. Does this mean we begin to inhabit a spiritual body even before the mortal body lies in death?

But I digress. My point is that bodies matter. And I still have a lot to learn about mine – all of them – in terms of that which they communicate and that of which they are capable.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

^[1] David Bentley Hart, The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology (Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2025), p. 111-113.

^[2] Hart, p. 109-111.

^[3] The Book of Common Prayer, p. 382.

I believe the value and validity of contemplative experience rests solely on the experience itself – never on any theory into which it can be plugged. Nothing is to be gained, and a great deal is lost, when we fit our experiences into an acceptable framework and think no more about them. We will never expand our knowledge of the contemplative life this way; we may even bog down in an illusion and, possibly, go no further with our interior Guide.^[1]

With this statement, Bernadette Roberts (1931-2017) throws down the gauntlet. Roberts, a life-long Catholic and former nun, is not well known, but she has emerged as one of the most significant Christian contemplatives of the late 20^th and early 21^st century. Spiritually precocious from a young age, she entered the monastery of Discalced Carmelites in Alhambra, California when she was 17 years old. She spent more than 8 years there, during which she experienced the grace of the unitive state with God.

This experience led her back into “the marketplace,” as she calls it, to a life of generous, self-giving love and service as a mother, educator, and, later, retreat leader. For the next 20 years, she lived in the world, testing and deepening her experience of the unitive state. Taking a phenomenological approach to reflection on her interior life, she chronicles her experience of the unitive state during these two decades in her book, The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center.

Traditionally, the unitive state has been considered the culmination of the Christian journey, the highest stage of spiritual development one can attain in this life. Since at least the time of Origen of Alexandria, Christian contemplatives have described the spiritual journey as a progression through three stages: purgative, illuminative, and unitive.^[2] The purgative stage involves the cultivation of virtue and freedom from distorted desires (passions). The illuminative stage brings enlightened understanding of the nature of life and discernment of our proper relationship to material and spiritual realities. The unitive stage is concerned with the contemplation of God the Holy Trinity, and divinization (the union of the personal will with God’s will).

Roberts describes her interior experience of union with God in some detail, and in conversation with the contemplative tradition. She is well versed in the mystical theology of the Church, but she tests everything against her own experience. For her, the whole journey was an ongoing illumination of the interior life rather than a distinct stage, and she experienced the “Dark Nights” famously described by the Spanish mystics in a unique sequence that didn’t follow the “normal” pattern.^[3] St. John of the Cross was one of the few spiritual writers who helped her to understand her experience, but she feels free to adapt his schema to her experience rather than trying to make her experience fit someone else’s categories.

What is the unitive stage like experientially? For Roberts, it was marked by different phases. It commenced with the Dark Night of the Spirit, in which her previous sense of the divine was altogether lost. It was a shattering experience that stripped away her ego-self to reveal a deeper center of identity in the depths of her being. This was accompanied by a loss of self-control and a sense of nothingness that brought her through a state of utter abandonment to a deeper repose in God as “the abiding stillpoint at the center of being.”^[4]

A second phase began with the discovery of this stillpoint and an immovable sense of inner peace. This inner peace became stabilized as a permanent condition, rather than an episodic, temporary experience. It became the center of her identity around which her entire interior life was reconstituted (including the ego-self). Repose in this silent center of being became continually accessible regardless of exterior circumstances, through an “active passivity” that constituted the union of the self as it was drawn by grace to this center, which is God. The completion of this unification marks the end of the Dark Night of the Spirit.^[5]

Now, Roberts found herself at the peak of unitive life. This was a third phase, in which continuous inner silence is experienced, akin to the prayer-of-quiet in which all of the faculties are stilled. It also entailed the silencing of memory for periods of time, a foretaste of the loss-of-self. From this place of repose there arose a great sense of strength, a tremendous power and energy of love that demanded expression. “This love is the burning flame that would suffer every trial and forfeit its life and experiences to be able to give as it has received.”^[6] The movement of interiorization and unification now turns outward in a tremendous explosion of energy in a life of selfless service.

What followed was a deeper identification with the path that Jesus followed in his own life and ministry, a path that leads through the active life to the crucifixion, understood by Roberts as the final death of the self (not just the ego, but the conscious reflexive capacity of the mind). The unitive state became the life of Christ lived out in her own unique circumstances, with a gradual burning away of all the subtle forms of self-seeking hidden in even her exercise of the virtues, until she was consumed completely by the living flame of love.

This fourth, active phase of the unitive stage, included an experiential dimension that was a kind of phase in its own right: what she calls the experience of “the open mind.” She came to realize the limitations imposed by personal frames of references, mental constructs, judgments and inherited patterns of thinking, which kept her locked in on herself and prevented her from really learning anything new. The cultivation of the open mind was a process over many years, in which she stepped outside of these patterned constructs and the judgments that accompany them. What she discovered in this open field of selfless awareness was a whole new depth of compassion, understanding, and acceptance of what is, and a capacity to give without regard for self-satisfaction or “success.” This experience of open mind was a key that opened the door from a self-centered to a God-centered life.^[7]

While Roberts discusses the unitive state in terms generally aligned with Christian contemplative tradition, even here she has her unique way of describing things. In union with God, what is united with God is not our active will, but rather our will-to-God, which is fashioned by God in the soul as oriented solely towards God.

This will-to-God has been passive to God from its beginning; it has always faced Him. But the active will, which is totally self-oriented, exerts itself to keep us on the surface of life, chained to a limited mentality. The active will must be incapacitated, made immovable, before the passive will can rise to the forefront of experience, and consciously be recognized for what it is – that aspect of self which belongs to God alone. Once this is accomplished, the active will takes up its ordinary life, but this time it takes its proper place as subordinate, and conformed to the unitive will-to-God.^[8]

So far, so good. What Roberts is describing is the subordination of the ego to the true self or divine center of the one’s being. In this sense, the path to the unitive state is a path to “no-ego.” She provides a fascinating account of the characteristics of the unitive state, further delineating its various movements and milestones in her interior life and return to “the marketplace.” It is a process of transformation into mature humanity wrought by God.

In truth, this union with God is the foundation of our existence. What is new in the unitive state is not union, but our awareness of it and our alignment with it.

What changes in life, then, is not our union with God, but the modes of its experience, its levels of realization. Thus, man is in the process of awakening to ever deeper and more perfect ways of realizing his oneness with God, a oneness which remains stable and immutable from the beginning, and remains so to the end.^[9]

In this union, the contemplative experiences God as the center of her being; it seems the self has been altogether eclipsed. However, the subjective pole of self-consciousness remains as that which perceives God; thus, we speak of the union of God and the self, rather than the identification of the self with God.^[10] This union does not ensure that all our actions are correct and that our judgments are infallible; the intellect and affective system remain subject to the vicissitudes of human finitude.

Only God and the soul know of this interior state; nothing appears of it on the outside. Some transformed souls will be likeable and others will not, but one thing they have in common is that they do not care if they are liked or not . . . Few, that is, dare to be themselves without putting on roles or playing social games. What the deified soul is, then, is a soul that is authentic, whole, natural, spontaneous, fearless, and strongly itself in every event and situation. God has not fashioned a wimp, weasel, or robot.^[11]

With such statements, Roberts approaches the directness, wit, and wisdom of St. Teresa of Avila. There is much more that Roberts has to say about the unitive state – its exuberant creative energy, outward-facing and sacrificial love, its embrace of suffering in witness to the depth of the soul’s centeredness and trust in God. She also is clear that the unitive state is neither an achievement – it is completely an act of grace – nor a guarantee of success. In fact, the person in the unitive state will be misunderstood and rejected. Here, Jesus, in his sacred humanity, is the model of the deified human being.

Again, all this is consistent with the witness of generations of Christian saints and mystics. What distinguishes Roberts from most of the previous tradition, is her insistence that the unitive state is not the end of the journey, either in this life or the next. In her experience, the path to “no-ego” that leads to the unitive state is only the middle of the journey. The unitive state, in fact, is itself a period of preparation for the next phase of the journey; it is the path to “no-self.”

The final phase of the unitive stage culminates with the loss of the self entirely. “Unknowingly, we have been stripped to the bare roots of personal experience, and are now prepared, poised on all levels of being for the final emptying.”^[12] Experientially, this phase is marked by the gradual loss of self-awareness and the gut-level energetic sense of one’s individual life. It feels similar to the absorption of the faculties in silence, but with the absence of any flame or interior strength. There is no longer any inward or outward movement; there is only the still center, and that center is everywhere.

Drawing on St. John of the Cross’ image of the coal and fire in The Living Flame of Love, Roberts writes,

The reason our present transformation is imperfect, he [St. John of the Cross] says, is that although the coal and fire (the soul and God) are one, the “fire nevertheless reduces the coal to ashes.” In other words, because there is no true equality of love between self and God, the self is eventually reduced to an ash heap; the weaker partner is consumed by flame, and when there is nothing left to consume, even the fire goes out. This is exactly what happens down the road; it is the most succinct explanation of the unitive life I know of. It also explains how and why we come to a later transformation: there has never been any equality in this union. Indeed, the reduction of the unitive self to an ash heap is the perfect fulfillment of the unitive life. But when there is nothing left, from the ash heap of “what was” arises the great vision of “what is.”^[13]

It is this transition from “what was” to “what is” that Roberts describes in her subsequent book, The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey. The book describes Roberts own experience of “no-self” and the two-year period following this momentous development. Theologically, the loss of the self is our identification with Christ’s movement from death through Resurrection to the Ascension to the Father. Here, Roberts operates completely outside of earlier maps of the interior life provided by Christian tradition; she is in uncharted (though not altogether unforeseen) territory.

Roberts makes use of Trinitarian categories to reflect on this transition. God is revealed in three ways. The Holy Spirit is our experience of the objective immediacy of God in the center of our being, the divine indwelling. The Father is the unmanifest aspect of God as transcendent first cause, the encounter with whom is beyond personal experience. Christ is the very life of the soul, the subjective experience of God. “We are not transformed into the Spirit; rather, it is the Spirit who transforms us into Christ, and while the Spirit continues to remain objective to us, Christ does not – in truth, he cannot.”^[14]

Thus, in the unitive state, we are one with Father and Spirit, but identical with Christ in a type of dual/nondual realization of the Trinity. It is only later, when all self-consciousness -Christ-consciousness – falls away, the God-as-object gives way to God-as-subject, or when the Oneness of the Godhead is realized beyond the Trinitarian God known to human consciousness. It is this transition from God to Godhead that I have tried to describe in The Experience of No-Self.^[15]

There are hints in the tradition of what Roberts describes as the experience of no-self, but they are obscure and tend to think the experience is at best episodic, if not impossible, in this life. These hints go at least as far back as The Gospel of John and St. Paul’s affirmation that

This experience of no-self beyond the unitive stage is obscurely present in the Mystical Theology of Dionysius the Areopagite (5^th/6^th Century), in what St. Bernard of Clairvaux describes as the “fourth degree of love” (12^th Century), in the writings of Meister Echart and of his student, Henry Suso (14^th Century), and in Stanza 39 of The Spiritual Canticle by St. John of the Cross (16^th Century). More recently, it is described by Thomas Merton as the next step in the contemplative journey, which “is not a step”:

What happens is that the separate entity that is you apparently disappears and nothing seems to be left but a pure freedom indistinguishable from infinite Freedom, love identified with Love. Not two loves, one waiting for the other, striving for the other, seeking for the other, but Love Loving in Freedom . . . And here, where contemplation becomes what it is really meant to be, it is no longer something infused by God into a created subject, so much as God living in God and identifying a created life with His own Life so that there is nothing left of any significance but God living in God.^[17]

This is what Roberts refers to as the experience of “God within God” rather than “God within me,” although in truth, it is Christ and not the self who is having this experience. Roberts witnesses to the possibility that it is possible to experience it before death – and that there really are no limits to our transformation into the fullness of the divine life. She believes that the unitive stage is, by God’s grace, the culmination of mature human adulthood, and that more people than we might suspect go on to the experience of “no-self” (and the God beyond God) in their elder years.

Roberts’ contemporary and colleague, Father Thomas Keating (1923-2018), also appears to have had the experience of “no-self” in the final years of his life. In fact, Roberts wrote the final revisions of The Path to No-Self while on retreat at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, where Keating lived.^[18] Keating described what he called “ultimate self” in terms much like Roberts’ use of “no-self” – a state of pure presence absent any sense of self-reflexive consciousness.^[19] This “ultimate self” is simply a node of universal consciousness through which the cosmos is perceiving itself, so to speak; what Roberts describes as “the Eye seeing itself.”^[20]

For both of these contemplative adepts, this is the seeing of the Unmanifest or Transcendent Divine. But as Cynthia Bourgeault notes, while Roberts continued to journey deeper into the Transcendent dimension, Keating moved back into the manifest realm while maintaining a kind of dance between the divine in its manifest (source of creation) and unmanifest (infinite transcendence) modes in what he called “unity consciousness.”^[21]

Roberts understood God as “All in All” only in the Unmanifest mode of the divine. Keating came to understand the “All in All” as the embrace of both modes. As Bourgeault argues, Keating came to see that there are no levels.

The Unmanifest is not higher, truer, more intrinsically holy than the manifest; they are interwoven aspects of the same oneness. The hidden path of love does not just lead to God; it emerges from God, its water flowing forth from that cosmogonic wellspring at the heart of the abyss. He came to know the great cosmogonic secret (Jacob Boehme called it the scientia) shrouded in that primordial uncreated light: that love requires both realms – manifest and unmanifest, “the source of all creation” and “infinite transcendence” – in order to fully realize its own fullness.^[22]

These two modes of divine life are in symbiotic unity. Earlier in her book on Keating, Bourgeault quotes the “other Thomas” – Thomas Merton.

God is both Father and Mother: As Father He stands in solitary night surrounded by darkness. As Mother, His shining is diffused, embracing all His creatures with merciful tenderness and light. The diffuse shing of God is Hagia Sophia [Holy Wisdom]. We call her his “glory.” In Sophia His power is experienced only as mercy and love.^[23]

In her bold witness, Bernadette Roberts illuminates both of these dimensions of God, reminding us of the endless potential for our transfiguration into the fullness of the divine life, if we have the courage to follow the path wherever it leads. Keating reminds us that, no matter how far we go along it, the path to and from the Source remains the path of love.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

^[1] Bernadette Roberts, The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 29-30.

^[2] This is an idea derived from Neo-Platonism, which Origen “Christianizes” and argues can only be understood properly based on the interpretation of the Bible. See Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Volume 1 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1991), p. 117.

^[3] Roberts, The Path to No-Self, p. 61.

^[4] Roberts, The Path of No-Self, p. 9.

^[5] Roberts, The Path to No-Self, p. 10.

^[6] Roberts, The Path to No-Self, p. 11.

^[7] Roberts, The Path to No-Self, p. 12-13.

^[8] Roberts, The Path to No-Self, p. 45.

^[9] Roberts, The Path to No-Self, p. 40.

^[10] Roberts, The Path to No-Self, p. 43.

^[11] Roberts, The Path to No-Self, p. 98-99.

^[12] Roberts, The Path to No-Self, p. 13-14.

^[13] Roberts, The Path to No-Self, p. 106-107.

^[14] Roberts, The Path to No-Self, p. 20-21.

^[15] Roberts, The Path to No-Self, p. 22.

^[16] I Corinthians 15:28.

^[17] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Books, 1961), p. 283-284.

^[18] Cynthia Bourgeault, Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Mystic (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Press, 2024), p. 128.

^[19] Bourgeault, p. 154.

^[20] Bernadette Roberts, The Experience of No-Self (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 92.

^[21] Bourgeault, p. 137-139.

^[22] Bourgeault, p. 139-140.

^[23] Bourgeault, p. 61.

Adulthood is the abdication of ecstasy.^[1]

Here at Awakened Heart, the focus – however obliquely – is about getting mystical. But what does that mean? And why?

The philosopher (and self-avowed atheist) Simon Critchley asks, “Wouldn’t you like to be lifted up out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness? If so, it might be well worthwhile trying to learn what is meant by mysticism and how it can shift, elevate, and deepen the sense of our lives.”^[2]

Mysticism describes an intensification of aliveness. It is experiential, rather than theoretical; or, better, it is first and foremost an experience that has a noetic quality. Mysticism, at least its Christian variety, is an intensification of aliveness that combines loving and knowing in a way that goes beyond our usual sense of self. It is ecstatic in that it takes one beyond the self. Mysticism involves, as Critchley suggests, the recovery of the playful, unselfconsciousness of childhood that we lose as we grow into the sense of self that defines and limits us in adulthood. Think of the Dalai Lama or Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Mysticism returns us from our ego-centric preoccupations and terminal separateness back into the stream of life. For the Johannine mystics, this stream of life is within us AND it runs through everything.

The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. (John 4:14b)

I came that they may may have life, and have it abundantly. (John 10:10b)

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. (Revelation 22:1-2a)

Mysticism, as the promise of ecstatic life, is the antidote to the melancholy and nihilism that shadows our present experience.

Ecstasy is what it feels like to be alive when we push away the sadness that clings to us. And sadness does cling to us. Reality presses in on us from all sides with a relentless force, a violence, which drains our energy and dissipates our capacity for belief and for joy. The world deafens us with its noise; our eyes sting from ever-enlarging incoherence of information and disinformation and the constant presence of war. We all feel, we all live, within the poverty of contemporary experience. This is a leaden time, a heavy time, a time of dearth. As a result, we feel miserable, anxious, wretched, bored.^[3]

Critchley invites us to turn to mysticism as a means of relief from the misery of this vale of tears; but mysticism is more than that. The intensification of loving and knowing that describes the mystical experience is not merely the cultivation of a feeling but also a perception of truth. It is not only an escape from the self and the world, but a journey into the “really real” that returns us to our self and to the world with a transformed consciousness. It is the perception of a larger wholeness, within which all is held, that renews and sustains our sense of aliveness and possibility.

To deepen our understanding of mysticism, it is helpful to turn, as Critchley does, to the work of Bernard McGinn. In his magisterial work, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (7 volumes in 9 books), McGinn provides a “thick description” of the varieties of, and continuities within, the mystical theology of the Christian west. In defining the meaning of mysticism at the outset of his study of the topic, McGinn makes three important points.

The first is that mysticism is only one element within a concrete religion; one aspect of the life of any particular mystic. Noting that, while the term “mystical” has an ancient provenance, its use as a noun, “mysticism,” dates only to the 17^thcentury. Thus, no mystic in the premodern West practiced “mysticism” – they practiced Christianity or Judaism or Islam. The mystical element only can be understood within the context of the constellation of belief and practices and institutions that constitute the religion as a whole. These various elements overlap and interrelate, and the mystical element varies in intensity and importance among different adherents of the religion and at different points in history.^[4]

When the mystical element assumes a certain level of intensity and importance in the life of a particular adherent of the religion, one can speak of mysticism. Even so, however much mysticism involves an experience of individual interiority marked by ineffability, it cannot be abstracted or understood apart from its social and ecclesial context - even if, especially when, it stands in tension with it. Thus, according to McGinn, you may have religion without mysticism, but you cannot have mysticism without religion.^[5]

Second, McGinn defines the mystical element in Christianity as “that part of its belief and practices that concerns the preparation for, the consciousness of, and the reaction to what can be described as the immediate or direct presence of God.”^[6] While the goal of mysticism is this direct encounter between the human and the divine, it cannot be isolated from the process and effect of the consciousness of the presence of God. Mysticism denotes a way of life, and not only the mystical encounter per se.

Third and finally, Christian mystics have understood this direct encounter with God in a variety of ways: union, marriage, contemplation, vision, deification, ecstasy, the birth of the Word in the soul, obedience to God’s will; all of these symbols and metaphors and more have been used to try to express its meaning. McGinn argues that

One thing that all Christian mystics have agreed on is that the experience itself defies conceptualization and verbalization, in part or in whole. Hence, it can only be presented indirectly, partially, by a series of verbal strategies in which language is used not so much informationally as transformationally, that is, not to convey a content but to assist the hearer or reader to hope for or to achieve the same consciousness.^[7]

McGinn prescinds from a focus on the nature and kinds of mystical experience because of the variety and ambiguity involved in describing what is, as the mystics themselves aver, ineffable and incommunicable. In speaking of “direct consciousness of the presence of God,” McGinn seeks to hew closely to the claim of the mystics themselves that their mode of access to God differs radically from that of ordinary consciousness, including awareness of God in other religious activities, rituals, and sacraments. Mystical texts witness to a form of direct divine presence that may be attained within the context of these ordinary religious observances, but is not limited to them.

What differentiates mystical from ordinary consciousness of God is its immediacy and ineffability (and, I would add, its effects in terms of the quality of aliveness referred to above).^[8] Again, while this immediacy describes the mystical encounter itself, the preparation for the encounter and its subsequent communication is always mediated by the history, language, and culture of the mystic; hence, a “mediated immediacy.” The authenticity or legitimacy of the mystical encounter can only be validated a posteriori on the basis of the mystic’s life, character, and teaching.

The consciousness of the immediate presence of God comprises new ways of loving and knowing that is ineffable, but it can be communicated indirectly; through parabolic expressions and paradoxical thematization, and, perhaps most importantly, through embodied witness. The mystics attest that God is not an object to be grasped, but rather the immediate, transforming center of life. The awareness of God’s presence in the inner life of the mystic engenders new ways of loving and knowing, of action and contemplation, that are visible and verifiable.^[9]

As Critchley notes, “God might be ineffable, but the mystics are constantly effing the ineffable, for as long as it effing takes.” However interior and intuitive the consciousness of the immediate presence of God may be, the preparation for the encounter and its subsequent explication is discursive (deeply engaged with reflection on sacred texts and teachings) and embodied in language, music, movement and ritual. All of this is part and parcel of the mystical.^[10]

Thus, one can see mystical encounters with God on a continuum with the mysteries of faith experienced through participation in the Church’s liturgy and sacraments. Mysticism is an intensification and interiorization of the Mystery they express. In that sense, mysticism is not the esoteric preserve of spiritual elites. It is available to all Christians in virtue of their being human, i.e. created in the image and likeness of God.

Baptism is initiation into the mystical journey: a journey that takes us beyond our self into the very life of God, the life of the world. This journey is not a flight from the world, but rather a homecoming in which we love and comprehend reality with renewed awe and tenderness; submerged in the stream of life, making our way to the source of the river.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.^[11]

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

^[1] Simon Critchley, On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy (London: Profile Books, 2024), p. 4.

^[2] Critchley, p. 3.

^[3] Critchley, p. 4.

^[4] Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Volume 1 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1991), p. xvi.

^[5] On this point, Critchley departs from McGinn’s (and my)understanding of mysticism. He wants to affirm mysticism as a as “a way of thinking about existential ecstasy that is outside and more than the conscious self” (p. 56) that can be found without religion or God – in art, poetry, music, sex and other modes of transcendence without an a priori transcendental. For him, mysticism is an aesthetic experience. In his final confession, Critchley writes, “What makes Christianity or any other faith valid and enduring is not the theoretical issue of the reality or otherwise of some metaphysical postulate like the existence of God, but the practices of devotion in which the participants of religion engage” (p. 288). Here, Critchley is simply making a category error. He wants ecstasy without divine encounter. I have no problem with that, but it is not mysticism. Even so, Critchley provides a sympathetic and learned, even beautiful, reading of the Christian mystics with whom he engages and contributes much to a deeper understand of mysticism.

^[6] McGinn, p. xvii.

^[7] McGinn, p. xvii.

^[8] McGinn, p. xix.

^[9] Critchley, p. 55, referencing McGinn.

^[10] Critchley, p. 63.

^[11] T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.

Earlier this week I finished reading Beatrice Bruteau’s little book, What We Can Learn From The East. It consists primarily of a set of talks that Bruteau shared with a group of Christian spiritual directors and retreat leaders in the early 1990s. She was asked to discuss what Christian spiritual teachers can learn from the encounter with Eastern religious traditions – particularly Hinduism and Buddhism. In doing so, she engaged in an experiment in comparative theology drawing from multiple traditions.

“The first thing we can learn about religion from the East,” she writes, “is that it is a matter of experience.”^[1] The question to ask with respect to religion is not “What do you believe?” but rather, “What have you experienced?” This shifts the ground away from matters of doctrines and creeds, toward practices that transform one’s consciousness of divine union. The main thing is union with God (absolute Reality or absolute Being). Ideas about God are quite secondary and may actually be barriers to the realization of God.

Bruteau boldly asserts that God-realization is the whole point of religion, and warns the spiritual directors she addresses:

I’m afraid a great many people have the idea, consciously or unconsciously, that religion exists to help them get through life, and they apply to God and to the saints for all sorts of assistance, relief, and advantage. I wouldn’t want to say that we ought never to pray for any of these things, but I would stress that we take care not to let our priorities, our sense of means and ends, become inverted. God-realization is the only thing that matters, and everything else is to be ordered to that. I would urge that one of the things we can either learn from or be supported in by the East is that we ought constantly to hold this ideal before ourselves and those with whom we discuss these matters. Transcend psychology for religion and religion for spirituality and realization.^[2]

The claim here is that religion is a means and God-realization is the end; and that this end eventually requires us to, in some sense, transcend the cult and creed of our religion. This is not a day’s work! It is a process that moves incrementally through different stages of development, and not always in a linear fashion. Bruteau borrows from Hindu traditions to describe these stages in terms of the chakras:

One way of describing one lineup of stages is by means of the chakras, the “wheels” or “centers of consciousness” through which the energy of manifestation in the finite order ascends to reunion with the Infinite of which it is, so to speak, the “flip side.” The energy, in the Hindu tradition, is called Shakti and the Infinite is called Shiva. The union is spoken of as a marriage. We might compare the relation of the Father and the Son, who indwell one another, the Son being the “exegete” or manifestation of the invisible Father (John 1:18). The centers of consciousness can be identified as security, pleasure, power, love, creativity, insight, and divine union.^[3]

Bruteau applies these Hindu concepts in a virtuoso interpretation of the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well in chapter four of the Gospel of John. We don’t know much about this Samaritan woman. The Western church treats her much like Mary Magdalene: as an icon of fallen womanhood restored to moral propriety. Of course, there is none of that in John’s story. Jesus says nothing of repentance or sin, as he does with the woman caught in adultery later in John’s Gospel.

Interestingly, the Eastern church saw her very differently. In the hagiography of Eastern Orthodoxy, the Samaritan woman, along with her sisters and her son, were baptized at Pentecost. At her baptism, she took the name, Photini, which means, “enlightened one.” She then began a wide-ranging missionary career that took her to Rome, where she was martyred by the emperor, Nero.

Bruteau also interprets the dialogue between Jesus and Photini in terms of the quest for enlightenment. While it may well have roots in an historical encounter, as a Gospel story it has taken on archetypal meaning. Their conversation is akin to Zen “dharma combat,” a provocation to deepen one’s experience of awakening. The dialogue is one of mutual encounter and transformation. Photini is, for Jesus, a figure of Sophia, drawing forth from him the depths of wisdom. For Photini, Jesus is a mirror of her true identity, the catalyst she needs to move into the final stage of spiritual development. ^[4]

In her archetypal reading of the story, Bruteau interprets the references to Photini’s “husbands” in terms of the chakras. What is being indicated is her successive movement through different “marriages,” different levels or centers of consciousness. What is being indicated is growth, and readiness to consummate the final “marriage;” not wantonness.

Her “husbands,” then, are the different attitudes she has taken toward life, the goals she has given herself to, the aspects under which she has perceived the reality of the world and the meaning of her existence, the attempts she has made to assuage her “thirst,” the series of drawings at the Well of Life that she has made.^[5]

In brief, Bruteau sketches out the nature of each “marriage” as an identification with a particular chakra:^[6]

1. Security – life is about meeting basic needs (or more, if we can get it) and securing ourselves against the threats to one’s existence (identification with the body).

2. Pleasure – life is about sexual energy broadly understood; satisfying relationships, family, tribal affiliation and identification; the reproduction and preservation of personal and social identity (identification with emotional attachments).

3. Power – life is about opportunities for exercising control, mastery, domination; the employment of one’s drive for success, however defined (identification with mental attachments to ideals).

4. Love – this marriage is more profound as the soul gives itself to others and recognizes their personhood (identification with concern for the common good, life is about Life, not just my life).

5. Creativity – in this marriage, life is about exercising power but in the service of others rather than self, with a transcendent aura of creativity; marriage to an art, a vocation, a calling (identification with sacred service).

6. Insight – this stage is some form of the contemplative life, with a growing freedom from attachment and desire for divine union, beyond identification with the relative and transient dimensions of experience, however noble.

This is where Photini finds herself, when she comes yet again to the Well. But the external Well, the “well of Jacob,” the well of a particular tradition, is losing its capacity to satiate her thirst. In her dialogue with Jesus, he invites her to transcend her particular cultural formation and tradition, to let go of her attachment to the external well, and find the wellspring within. It isn’t about the traditions of your people. It isn’t about which Temple you attend. It isn’t even about the coming of the Messiah, as an external and future revelation.^[7]

The “it” of religion she has been searching for, the consummation of the consummate marriage with the divine, can only be found by first losing her religion, and discovering the wellspring within. She has to lose her religion (as a merely external observance) to find it. Not even the Messiah can draw the water for her; he can only point her to its inner reality, mirroring her true identity back to her: “I AM, the one who is speaking to you” (John 4:26). What she is seeking is already available, within her. It always has been.

In this exchange between Photini and Jesus, Photini’s discerning questions draw forth the wisdom of Jesus, the fullness of revelation, and Jesus’ answers skillfully bring Photini through the passage from the sixth to the seventh, and final, “marriage.” She now knows that what she is seeking is within, and he now understands fully his mission, confirming his baptismal commissioning. The final “marriage” is that of seeking and finding through a dynamic process of mirroring and interiorization that makes the well of Jacob superfluous for them.

But the story doesn’t quite end there. The return of the other disciples, still clueless, interrupts the narrative. Photini returns home. Jesus continues his journey. The enlightenment of the final stage, divine union, does not take them out of the world, but returns them to it; albeit nourished by a quite different Source than the water of Jacob’s well and the food brought by the disciples.

The point of the story is not what Photini believed, but what she experienced and the transformation of consciousness that resulted. In her book, Bruteau goes on to describe more fully the practice that fosters this process and prepares us for this experience. What Photini experienced, and what we may realize in reflecting on her story, is the profound and provocative truth that Bruteau describes so well:

It is only when the great icons, the sacred persons who image the supreme values, are viewed as paradigms and revelations of what is actually true of all of us that they can exercise their spiritual power. They release that power precisely by revealing to us the secret of what we truly are, to that we may find that truth in ourselves.^[8]

Tradition has it that Saint Photini was martyred by being thrown down a well. The law, the tradition, the external form kills. It is the Spirit, the heart, the inner wellspring, that gives life. You have to lose your religion to find what it is you are seeking. Once you find it, religion is no longer who you are. It is not the Source of your identity: “I am a Christian.”

No.

“I AM.”

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

^[1] Beatrice Bruteau, What We Can Learn From The East (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1995), p. 5. Bruteau was a pioneering figure in interreligious dialogue and contemplative spirituality. She earned a doctorate in philosophy from Fordham University, and her worked bridged the disciplines of comparative theology and philosophy, cosmology, science, and psychology. Her characterization of the vast traditions of South and East Asian religions as “the East” in this book is inherently reductionistic; but it is done for heuristic purposes to address a lay audience. With this caveat in mind, it provides an instructive, even provocative, invitation to learn from the “religious other” how to see one’s own tradition in new ways.

^[2] Bruteau, p. 13.

^[3] Bruteau, p. 13.

^[4] Bruteau, p. 14. While Bruteau never uses the name, Photini, I will follow the Eastern Church’s tradition in doing so.

^[5] Bruteau, p. 16.

^[6] Bruteau, p. 17-20.

^[7] Bruteau, p. 19-20.

^[8] Bruteau, p. 105.

The following is a sermon I preached at Catedral de São Paulo, Lisboa, Portugal on March 19, 2026. The occasion was an interfaith service of lamentation, prayer and hope for immigrants from the United States and their friends. - John Kirkley+

Although I was born and raised in Indiana, for nearly 30 years I lived in California and served as a parish priest in several Episcopal congregations in San Francisco. I found myself returning to the Bay Area in seeking inspiration for our gathering tonight, in the form of Rebecca Solnit. You may be familiar with her work. She is a long-time progressive activist, Buddhist teacher, and brilliant essayist.

Solnit was recently interviewed in the New York Times on the occasion of the publication of her latest book. In that interview, she remarked that one of her friends refers to her as “the hope lady.”^[1] With her help, I want to speak a word of hope; even though, as Solnit recognizes, the world is falling apart. I don’t need to cite the litany of horrors that seem to multiply each day; many of them are expressed in our prayers. They weigh heavy on our hearts.

Solnit invites us to see the present destruction and chaos as the end of one era and birth of another; a painful but potentially hopeful transition to a better future. She describes this change of eras using the familiar image of the caterpillar becoming a butterfly. “The beginning comes after the end,” she writes.

A chrysalis is the beginning of a butterfly, but in that chrysalis is no elegant transition. The caterpillar falls apart – it turns to goo, and something profoundly different reconstitutes from it, guided by hitherto dormant imaginal cells. In that slurry, the dissolving caterpillar’s immune system perceives the imaginal cells as alien and attacks them. But they survive, multiply, and set in motion the instructions to become a butterfly . . . A butterfly is the end of a caterpillar. The beginning – the next era – comes after the end of the last one, and in between comes a lot of falling apart.^[2]

We are living through the falling apart of the American Empire and the ideology of global racial capitalism that legitimated it. It is collapsing under the weight of its own corruption, greed, misogyny and racism. This collapse has activated dormant imaginal cells, which are catalyzing the creation of a new story of multicultural democracy from the goo of a dying Pax Americana. This is not an easy or painless process, as the empire’s immune system attacks these imaginal cells as alien influences, creating intense backlash in response to the progress in human rights and environmental justice of the past 75 years.

This is what gives Solnit – and us – grounds for hope. The ferocity of the backlash is a sign that the old world is coming to an end, and that the future for which we struggle remains open. A new world is beginning, one in which a critical mass of humans are beginning to perceive the deep interconnection of all things, and the ethical implications of that insight. From the recognition of the intersectionality of different justice movements, to the symbiotic and ecological understanding of life in the biological sciences; from the new cosmology of quantum physics to the integral consciousness emerging from the encounter between the world’s Wisdom traditions; we are living as Pope Francis famously said, “not in an era of change, but a change of eras.”^[3]

The beginning comes after the end. But living through the end is no picnic. During his imprisonment by the Fascist regime in Italy, Antonio Gramsci wrote in 1930, “The old world is dying. The new one is slow in appearing. In this light and shadow, monsters arise.”^[4] In the falling apart of the American empire, the MAGA monsters have emerged; revealing that racism and misogyny and greed are not a bug, but rather a feature, of empire. Our indigenous and African-American siblings have been trying to tell us this for centuries. Now, the masks have come off and the quiet parts are being said out loud. Donald Trump is what a dying empire looks and sounds like. We are in the goo.

One way to read the Bible is as a procession of one empire after another – Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman. The Bible is a record of an indigenous people caught in the crossroads between rising and dying empires built on inequality, slavery, debt, and violence. It is a story of the struggle to build an alternative, egalitarian community rooted in just and sustainable relationships between peoples and the earth – and the temptations to betray this vision. It is the revelation that the Divine is the creative power that continually renews life and inspires the reimaging of the promise of the beloved community.

The prophet Isaiah reminds us that when the empire strikes back, when we are tempted to assimilate to its oppressive culture, the call is for us to double down on the beloved community: to care for the vulnerable, to heal the broken-hearted, to rebuild the institutions of our common life and reclaim the streets brutalized by occupying powers.^[5] When things are falling apart, our work is to sustain the movements for human rights, justice, peace, and sustainability that continually expose the lie of empire, and create alternative communities that embody the future for which we hope. Here, our inspiration is the people of Minneapolis, whose heroic, nonviolent efforts to protect their immigrant neighbors from state sponsored terrorism exemplifies the promise – and the reality – of the beloved community.

Amitav Ghosh, novelist and climate activist, writes, “What is distinctive about our time is that its monsters consist not only of political extremists of all kinds, but also of weather events that could not have been conceived of in Gramsci’s lifetime.”^[6] The American empire is coterminous with a global system of racial capitalism that initiated and accelerates the destabilization of the entire planet’s climate. It constitutes a degree of falling apart unprecedented in human history.

Efforts to prevent global warming have failed. The window of climate stability over the last 10,000 years that allowed for the flourishing of homo sapiens – the Holocene Era – is coming to an end. We are living through a change in geological eras as well as a change in civilizational eras. What is left to us is the work of mitigation – work measured in centuries and millennia. It will require a wholesale re-imagining of how we live on the earth in harmony with the rest of creation.

An indigenous elder, the Kashaya Pomo Dreamer Essie Parrish, urged her people in the 1950s to preserve the teachings of their ancestors because “one day, the white people would come to us to learn how to take care of the land.”^[7] That day has come. It is the wisdom of our indigenous siblings, born of great suffering, that will be the greatest source of insight and strength as we imagine the beginning after the end of a stable climate. Already, that wisdom is rebirthing awareness of the consciousness of other creatures, of respect for the integrity and rights of creation, and of our relationship to the earth as our island home.

The ending of the civilizational and geological world as we have known it constitutes a collective dark night of the soul. The monsters are real. And yet . . . it may be the catalyst for an evolutionary leap in human consciousness. Andrew Harvey, one of our greatest living mystics, shares a prophecy that was given to him by another great mystic of the past century, Father Bede Griffiths:

The second coming of Christ is not going to be the return of a Star Wars avatar, but rather the rising of the golden yeast of divine love consciousness in millions of beings who have been stripped of their illusions by the dark night and connected through its anguish to the power of all transforming love.^[8]

It is this “Christ consciousness” or “Buddha nature,” call it what you will, that Thomas Merton described as

. . . like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven.
It is in everybody, and if we could see it
We would see these billions of points of light
Coming together in the face and blaze of a Sun
That would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.[9]

It is this emerging consciousness expressed in Amanda Gorman’s call to

Come, look up with kindness yet,
For even solace can be sourced from sorrow.
We remember, not just for the sake of yesterday,
But to take on tomorrow.

We heed this old spirit,
In a new day’s lyric,
In our hearts, we hear it . . .
Come over, join this day just begun.
For whenever we come together,
We will forever overcome.[10]

“Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way,” Arundhati Roy assures us. “Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”^[11]

The beginning comes after the end. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

^[1] David Marchese, “The Interview: Rebecca Solnit Says the Left’s Next Hero Is Already Here,” The New York Times (March 7, 2026).

^[2] Solnit, The Beginning Comes After the End (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2026), p. 11.

^[3] His Holiness Pope Francis, speech before a decennial conference of the Italian Catholic Church (Florence, Italy, November 10, 2015).

^[4] Solnit, p. 20.

^[5] Isaiah 58:1-12.

^[6] Solnit, p. 22

^[7] Solnit, p. 14.

^[8] Andrew Harvey, lecture on “The Global Dark Night of the Species,” Spiritual Directors International, October 24, 2023.

^[9] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday, 1966), p. 142.

^[10] Amanda Gorman, “A New Day’s Lyric” (January 1, 2022).

^[11] Solnit, p. 138.

Jesus is a friend of mine.

I can sense the scrunching nose and crawling skin you may experience reading this line: “Jesus is a friend of mine.” If you grew up in a certain kind of Christian environment, it is reminiscent of a happy-clappy, saccharine relationship with Jesus: lots of drama, lots of sentimentality; not a lot of insight or awareness. There was a possessive, almost jealous quality to it. Jesus is my friend – not yours. It was an exclusive relationship, because Jesus only hung out with the “right” kind of people, who believed the “right” things about him.

Coming of age in that kind of environment, I saw early on that such “friendship” said more about the people who claimed it than it did about Jesus. It confirmed people in their sense of self-righteousness and didn’t really require much of them in the way of change or growth. Friendship with Jesus was a kind of divine rescue operation, in which the church was a lifeboat steered by Jesus, saving people one individual at a time – and only had so much room. Once you were in the boat, you were good. You might be glad of the “friendship” with the captain of the ship, but it remained a transactional relationship; not really a friendship, marked by mutuality in which the relationship to the other becomes internal to one’s own identity. Jesus became human, but his “friends” didn’t seem to become divine.

I thought about this re-reading Richard J. Foster’s chapter on “Meditation” in Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, after being invited to give a talk on meditation to a parish group studying Foster’s book. I first came across it in the 1990s, although it was published in 1978. It was groundbreaking in that it reintroduced ancient spiritual practices to many Protestant, and especially Evangelical, Christians. Foster got a few things wrong, in my humble opinion, but one thing that he got right was his discussion of meditation in terms of friendship.

In describing the purpose of meditation, Foster quotes from the 15^th century spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ,

In meditation we are growing into what Tomas à Kempis calls “a familiar friendship with Jesus.”^[1]

Foster writes movingly of meditation as a means of creating a sanctuary in the heart, wherein Jesus dwells with us continually. This inner communion nurtures a relationship with Christ such that his living reality begins to permeate all of life. There is nothing sentimental or maudlin about such friendship. The relationship changes us, as we become increasingly conformed to the way of Jesus, letting go of the barriers to Christ’s work in us.^[2]

This echoes the teaching of the Gospel of John, in which Jesus tells his disciples,

I do not call you slaves any longer, because the slave does not know what the master is doing, but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.^[3]

The image here is of movement from slavery to friendship; from submission to equality; from ignorance to knowledge. Friendship implies mutuality and vulnerability, as we share ourselves fully with our friend. Friendship changes us. Friendship with Jesus is especially transformative, because what is shared is the very love and life of God.

Beginning to meditate means risking vulnerability with Jesus, the human face of God. It is only as we begin to trust that we are loved by Jesus that the process of change can begin. Jesus does not overpower or dominate us, treating us like a slave. Jesus invites us into the mutual sharing of friendship, revealing to us the divine nature that he wants to share with us as we fully embrace his – and our – humanity.

With her usual simplicity and wit, St. Teresa of Avila similarly describes meditation (what she calls mental prayer) as friendship.

For mental prayer in my opinion is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us. In order that love be true and the friendship endure, the wills of the friends must be in accord.^[4]

Teresa would agree with Foster that meditation is about developing a friendship with Jesus in which we become conformed to his will. Just as Jesus only speaks the words that the Father speaks, and does what the Father does, so we become aligned with the divine will.^[5]

But then, Teresa goes a bit beyond Foster when she continues by exclaiming,

Oh, what a good friend you make, my Lord! How you proceed by favoring and enduring. You wait for the others to adapt to Your nature, and in the meantime You put up with theirs!^[6]

Teresa alludes here to a transformation of consciousness that goes beyond the alignment of wills to a participation in the divine nature; what the Eastern Church would describe as participation the divine energies, whereby the soul is divinized (theosis). This is consistent with the view of St. Paul,

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.^[7]

What is being described is a progressive (evolutionary?) deepening of our transformation into the divine nature (consciousness or mind of Christ), a continuous stretching (epectasis) of the soul toward the divine as St. Greogry of Nyssa described it.^[8] What begins as a developing friendship with Jesus gradually transforms us into the glory of God - a process that begins in this life and continues beyond it.

Meditation, then, moves into contemplation, an inner self-emptying and spaciousness in which the divine light begins to transform our perception of reality and our capacity to respond to it with wisdom and compassion. Friendship with Jesus is no longer about getting into the lifeboat. Salvation is not rescue; it is participation.

As Cynthia Bourgeault writes,

The wager is this: that Jesus, the living master, is real, alive, and intimately and vibrantly enfolding you right now. He is more present, in fact, than even your breath or your heartbeat. But to really know this presence you need to tune in on a different wavelength: to shift from your usual binary operating system [knowing through separation of subject and object]to the heart frequency [a holistic, intuitive knowing] where this Jesus connection broadcasts. Wisdom Christianity is practice-driven. When you do the practices that nurture the heart, you will sense this connection as a living bond.^[9]

This way of knowing Jesus goes beyond subjective experience, and while it may occasion passionate devotion and emotional receptivity, it is not an ecstatic, temporary state. It goes deeper than that.

You may have the impression that when I talk about “going deeper into your heart to discover the living Christ” that I mean a subjective emotional experience. I don’t. The wisdom tradition has always taught that the subjective (what we call “subjective” anyway) is really introduced by your personality, sustained by the binary operating system. When you go deeper than that, when you tunnel beneath the still waters, you are actually able to mirror a truth that is in a final sense objective, hence recognizable as truth to all hearts that are open at that same level. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Remember that beatitude? The demand for purification is real, of course, and revelation gets abused when people simply download celestial insights into their own untamed egos . . . But we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Real singleness of heart is hard to come by. It takes much patient practice and purification. But Jesus himself does promise that the spirit of truth lies within you, and it connects with reality, not just your subjective meanderings.^[10]

We do not have to change to be loved by Jesus, but being loved, we will be changed. Christian meditation is the risk of deepening friendship with Jesus. It can change your very identity, and your life.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

^[1] Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1978), p. 19.

^[2] Foster, p. 20.

^[3] John 15:15.

^[4] St. Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, p. 96 in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Volume One (Washington, D.C: ICS Publications, 1976).

^[5] John 5:19, 8:28, 14:10.

^[6] St. Teresa of Avila, p. 97.

^[7] 2 Cor. 3:18.

^[8] St. Gregory of Nysaa, The Life of Moses (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), II, 225, 318.

^[9] Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2008), p. 136-137.

^[10] Bourgeault, p. 137.

We are experiencing a collective crisis in spiritual leadership. According to the Gallup poll, only 30% of Americans rate clergy as highly trustworthy and ethical and only 36% have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in religious institutions. Similar polling in Europe shows a great deal of variability by country, but there, too, trust in religious institutions is low in many countries. Secularization in general, and communism in the former Soviet bloc countries in particular, are contributing factors in Europe. Distrust of institutions of all kinds is on the rise in both the United States and Europe.

I suspect another, simpler explanation. We don’t trust spiritual leaders because many of them have not proven themselves to be trustworthy. What is more, when spiritual leaders betray trust, their colleagues and institutions often defend and protect them. This is true across the spectrum of spiritual traditions, from Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to Chögyam Trungpa.

The wave of scandals involving spiritual leaders and institutions indicates that the problem is not simply one of a few bad actors. The problem is cultural and institutional. I can’t speak for other traditions, but I recognize the need to reimagine how we prepare spiritual leaders in my tradition (Anglican Christian), and how we hold them accountable.

Recognize that old models don’t work

I think the first step is to acknowledge the depth of the problem. There is a lot of denial around how much bad behavior is tolerated in many congregations and religious institutions. There is a lack of basic ethical formation and nurturing healthy relationships in community, including how to deal with increasing social conflict and polarization. Expectations of clergy are unrealistic, and there is a lot of uncertainty about how best to prepare people for spiritual leadership. Old models are under tremendous stress from the challenges of institutional decline, social dislocation, and ecological destruction.

I was trained in the “old leadership model” of mainline Protestantism. That model assumed the existence of “Christendom” – a basic level of shared cultural Christianity (or “Judeo-Christian” culture) that informed people’s worldview and morality. It focused largely on the intellectual formation of clergy leaders in expensive three-year graduate programs, with some attention to pastoral and managerial skills. Preparation was for full-time employment in financially self-supporting congregations.

Spiritual formation of clergy leaders, to the extent there was any, was communal and liturgical, rather than personal and contemplative. It was assumed that we knew how to pray and cultivate spiritual maturity, or that we would pick it up along the way. Spiritual leadership was equated with managing and maintaining religious programs and institutions.

Now, this was the early 1990s, when these assumptions already were beginning to be challenged.

“Christendom” is now dead, if it ever existed in modernity as anything more than the colonial ideology of imperialist projects. The movement toward a genuinely multicultural, democratic society of nations, and emerging global inter-spiritual community of Wisdom traditions, is threatened by polarization, ethno-nationalism, and authoritarianism. Christendom is dead, but its ghost still haunts us.

The sustainability of congregations as free-standing, self-supporting institutions with large campuses and programs is increasingly rare; as are the full-time clergy jobs they once supported. We can no longer assume the economic or even ecological stability that sustained our institutions. Sustainability, and its institutional forms, will look very different as the global climate crisis accelerates.

The “therapeutic, managerial” model of leading religious institutions is wholly inadequate to the spiritual hunger and wholeness of human beings – including the human beings leading them. I suspect this always was true. We will need new models of spiritual leadership formation and accountability that recognize our hunger for spiritual depth, and foster the evolution of human consciousness.

These are huge cultural and institutional shifts. It is no wonder that our leaders and communities are stressed out, and that there is a crisis of spiritual leadership. Finding our footing and developing new models will require time, patience, and experimentation. There are no quick fixes. We need to acknowledge the scope and complexity of the shifts we are experiencing.

Preparing spiritual leaders

The models of spiritual leadership development that we need today have yet to be created. The old model of a three-year graduate degree completed on location at a seminary is disappearing. I don’t think anyone yet knows what institutional forms that training will take, but it will be increasingly local and contextual, reflecting the cultures, languages, and eco-systems of the local community.

I suspect that dioceses, or equivalent regional judicatory structures, will need to take on the primary responsibility for leadership formation previously provided by seminaries or other institutions of higher education. If they survive at all, those institutions of higher education increasingly will serve as centers for research and innovation resourcing leadership training at the local and regional level.

In terms of content, spiritual leadership training will need to be much more holistic, developmental, and inter-spiritual. By “holistic,” I mean the cultivation of the various dimensions of human intelligence as an integral part of the social and ecological community: spiritual, ethical, cognitive/intellectual, emotional/relational, aesthetic, kinesthetic, etc. Modern seminary education is largely cognitive in its approach, with little attention to the other dimensions of human being. This contributes to the moral failings and spiritual shallowness of spiritual leaders, who are too much “in their head,” and not integrated with their heart and body. Integration and integrity are the foundation of spiritual leadership and spiritual growth.

By “developmental,” I am referring to the dynamic and evolutionary nature of human consciousness. Christian traditions, and especially modern seminary education, have not done a very good job of transmitting the spiritual technologies (practices) that foster the transformation of consciousness; what Jesus calls metanoia and St. Paul describes as “putting on the mind of Christ.” Put simply, too many of our clergy are unfamiliar with inner work and the embodied practices that support it, and don’t know how to teach them to others. Spiritual growth requires effort and the tools to do the work. It is a never-ending journey into the fullness of the divine life.

While “continuing education” is required for most clergy, it is very half-hazard and left to the individual to piece together. There needs to be an effort to develop life-long training that takes place within a supportive peer community, and focuses on the cultivation of the inner life, ethical formation, and mature integration of spiritual leaders. Skill building and theological rigor have their place, but in the absence of moral and spiritual maturity they will not bear good fruit. Spiritual leaders do not emerge fully formed after a 3 year degree program!

By inter-spiritual, I mean open to the riches of other Wisdom traditions, and somewhat conversant with one or two of them. As Christian spiritual leaders, it is impossible to understand our tradition without at least a basic understanding of Judaism (and not only biblical Judaism). We can no longer pretend that the other Wisdom traditions do not exist or inform the development of our own tradition. This must go beyond learning “about” other traditions, to real encounter and experiential learning at the local level. This could be an element of continuing education.

In short, the focus of spiritual leadership must shift from managing and maintaining religious programs and institutions, to fostering communities of spiritual practice that support the evolution of human/divine consciousness. Organizations like The Center for Contemplation and Action and Wisdom Waypoints are pioneering elements of the training for spiritual leadership that we need, and experimenting with new communities of practice.

Institutional accountability

One of the most common mistakes about spiritual leadership, is the conflation of “higher education” and moral development. A spiritual leader (priest, rabbi, imam, guru, mentor) may be quite advanced in terms of their intellectual formation, and even their stage of consciousness, but lagging in moral development. Spiritual knowledge or charisma does not ensure ethical behavior. Ordination or equivalent certification as a spiritual leader by a religious institution or tradition does not ensure ethical behavior.

As I mentioned above, renewed moral and spiritual formation of spiritual leaders is needed, as well the development of emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills. Such development must be ongoing, including practices of discernment, cultivation of the virtues, and accountability. In this regard, old practices like the examen, the rite of reconciliation and spiritual guidance have continuing value. We have much to learn from the modern revival and reconceptualization of these practices, such as the spirituality of 12-Steps groups for recovery from addictions.

One of the lessons of 12-step recovery is that one-on-one practical guidance from an experienced mentor or spiritual director (sponsor), combined with peer support group, provides a robust structure of accountability. Of course, such structures are only as valuable as the willingness of participants to make honest use of them. Spiritual leaders should be expected to have a spiritual guide/coach/mentor and a peer support group.

Speaking from personal experience, I have worked continually with spiritual directors for some 30 years now. I participate in two peer support groups – one that has been ongoing for 24 years, and another for 18 years. These accountability structures have been instrumental in my spiritual, emotional, and moral development and have supported me in developing spiritual and wellness practices. I can’t imagine spiritual leadership without them.

In addition, spiritual leaders should have written agreements with the communities or institutions they serve that includes a code of conduct (most templates I’ve seen do not). These should be reviewed and updated periodically. Here, accountability should work both ways.

Membership in religious communities or congregations should also entail commitment to a code of conduct. This would at least set a shared standard of behavior (which can no longer be assumed). The Association for Spiritual Integrity has developed sample honor codes for spiritual leaders, students, and organizations, as well as training resources. Moral and spiritual development should be ongoing for everyone in spiritual communities.

Accountability structures should be in place to help prevent violations of trust. The real difficulty, of course, is the engagement of accountability structures after violations of trust have occurred. Defined processes for reporting, investigation, and resolution should be clearly articulated and well-understood by everyone in the congregation or institution. These processes should be administered by competent third-parties with the requisite expertise. When potential violations of the law are involved, the matter should be referred to the appropriate civil or criminal legal authorities.

In all honesty, I don’t think many religious organizations are equipped to handle disciplinary matters. We need credible, independent structures to adjudicate these issues. My hope is that more attention to the prevention of violations of trust will reduce the need for disciplinary proceedings, but when violations happen we need to have confidence that they will be handled appropriately.

What I am suggesting is not a “solution.” I’m simply offering some observations and reflections to invite deeper collective acknowledgement of, and engagement with, these issues. Spiritual leadership always has been challenging, and has continually adapted to new circumstances. It has never been more important, and the emergence of new models will require us to entrust our best efforts to the future that God desires for us: a future that we cannot yet fully see – or can only see in the dark, as it were. That is the essence of faith.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

I was not surprised, but I was truly disturbed, to learn of the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and spiritual teachers such as Deepak Chopra and Jeffrey Martin. Lissa Rankin brought attention to Martin’s connection with Epstein in her Substack blog. She points to the relevant emails in the cache of documents published online by the U.S. Department of Justice. Those emails can be found here and here.

Chopra is a well-known guru. Martin is less well-known, but last year I wrote a mostly appreciative review of his work on “Fundamental Wellbeing” – his term for spiritual awakening or enlightenment. Having promoted his research, I now feel an obligation to acknowledge my failure to discern the dangerous, dare I say, diabolical, aspects of his work. I had some inkling of it but I entirely missed its significance.

As I noted in that review,

“While Martin is appreciative of religious traditions, he seems to think that Fundamental Wellbeing is attainable without a particular moral foundation or cosmological container. He is even pursuing experimental interventions to produce Fundamental Wellbeing through the application of medical technologies such as transcranial focused ultrasound . . .

The good of Fundamental Wellbeing is internal to the practices designed to attain and sustain it, and the practices themselves are internal to a tradition that transmits them. There are no quick fixes, and the practices are not separable from the moral foundation upon which they are built and the metaphysical superstructure that gives them meaning.”

This should have set of warning bells in my head and in my heart. Martin’s aim is to understand human consciousness and its potential for continuous development by studying people who have attained higher levels of consciousness (spiritual enlightenment or awakening), AND develop a method to reproduce those levels of consciousness (and the associated sense of personal wellbeing) independent from the moral and spiritual practices developed through religious traditions.

He is attempting to separate spiritual knowledge and power from any moral or metaphysical container. He is attempting to make such power available to people without consideration of the purposes to which that power will be used. And he is attempting to commodify the methodology for quickly attaining the higher states of consciousness that provide such knowledge and power.

What is diabolical about this project is the separation of spiritual knowledge from moral virtue. “Dia-bolic” means throwing apart or dividing; as opposed to “sym-bolic,” meaning to throw together or unite. Martin is attempting to separate the evolution of human consciousness from the cultivation of human morality. This is opposed to the fundamental teaching of all the great Wisdom traditions, including Christianity, in which the technologies for the transformation of consciousness must be rooted in the cultivation of moral virtue.

The dangerous nature of Martin’s project is made clear in his email correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein. Reading it provides a vivid and sickening example of spiritual power untethered from moral foundations. It is especially demeaning of women, who are objectified and treated as payment for services. Rather than quoting extensively from the emails, which you can read for yourself, I will summarize the essential points.

1. It appears that Epstein learned of Martin’s research, and wanted to procure his services to obtain the paranormal powers associated with higher states of consciousness. Martin makes it clear that other billionaires have sought such services, and that he only takes on selective clients deemed suitable candidates.

2. The two emails date from July 2017. It is clear from the timing and content of the emails that Martin is well aware of Epstein’s legal problems and reputation. In fact, Martin alludes to Epstein’s trafficking in women, both as a public relations (not moral) problem that will require him to use an alias, and as a part of Martin’s compensation (the provision of “attractive models or Russians” as part of his housing accommodations). Martin is fully aware that many spiritual adepts would be unwilling to work with Epstein if they knew his identity, precisely because of the kind of moral concerns that Martin ignores.

3. Martin, a Harvard Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience, explains the purpose of his research into enlightenment as “working to engineer it, trying to lay the necessary groundwork for a commercial ecosystem for it when it is needed.” In other words, for Martin, “enlightenment” is a product to be commodified. Spiritual experiences and spiritual power are available for those willing to pay for them. His fee to work with Epstein: $10M after taxes plus expenses (including the aforementioned “models or Russians”).

4. Martin is selling access to paranormal power as an end in itself. Moral considerations are not important. His focus is on advancing his research agenda and return on investment. He responds to Epstein’s inquiries about “the weird stuff,” because he thinks Epstein will be a good candidate for the cultivation of spiritual power. To what end? To be a more effective sex trafficker? For financial gain? As a hobby? That question doesn’t come up, even though it is clear that Epstein is seeking to find a way to turn spiritual experiences and powers into “a mechanism of action.”

Reading these emails, I am convinced that there is something truly diabolical at work here. Martin has used his academic credentials and research skills to identify and study spiritual adepts. Apparently, he has been able to parley some of these research subjects into a pool of consultants willing to assist clients to obtain higher levels of consciousness. Martin is concerned to keep these “consultants” in the dark about the dubious nature of potential clients, such as Epstein. It is a pay to play scheme for spiritual power.

If Martin were simply a particularly skilled snake oil salesman, marketing his spiritual wares to exploit naïve and vulnerable people, that would be bad enough. I suspect that what is at work here is more nefarious even than that. He is a bona fide research scientist, who has become aware of the reality of higher states of consciousness. He is fascinated by its potential for personal happiness, power and wealth.

For Martin, someone like Epstein is attractive as a client and research subject, and as a funder. He may be even more attractive because of his network of elite contacts in industry and government, who might be very interested in the potential of Martin’s research as a tool of power and control. And its potential for commodification. Here, I can only speculate, reading between the lines of Martin’s emails to Epstein.

Religious leaders are subject to the same forces of corruption, greed, and degeneracy as leaders of other institutions. Religious traditions, including Christianity, have long warned of the dangers of spiritual pride and vainglory, recognizing that those who have attained higher levels of consciousness have the power to do great harm. We are all too familiar with the abuses in our congregations and institutions, when spiritual power is separated from moral virtue.

While our religious traditions and institutions are manifestly imperfect, they do provide moral frameworks to limit the potential abuse of spiritual power and metaphysical maps to direct its aims. They not only provide technologies for the development of higher consciousness, but also methods to discern the readiness of candidates for their use and provisions for discipline when they are abused. They focus on the cultivation of wisdom and compassion, knowledge and love, in the service to humanity and the cosmos; they strongly warn against self-interested motives or preoccupation with paranormal power.

The attempt to obtain spiritual power, unconstrained by any moral scruple or metaphysical ideal, is truly diabolical. Beware of gurus who refuse to operate within any structures of accountability. In this age of increasing numbers of people, and teachers, who are “spiritual but not religious,” I’m grateful for the efforts of folks like Rick Archer, who co-founded the Association for Spiritual Integrity (ASI), promoting ethical spiritual leadership.

ASI’s statement, “On Deepak Chopra, Jeffrey Martin, and the Epstein Files: This Conversation Isn’t New” provides a helpful contextualization of this most recent episode of spiritual abuse. The problem isn’t just one of individual bad actors, but of a failure to develop healthy norms of institutional accountability. ASI’s statement includes concrete recommendations in this regard, which should be read, marked, learned and inwardly digested by every spiritual community, judicatory, and institution. I hope to write more about this. They also provide training and support for leaders and communities developing ethical practices and guidelines.

Such accountability requires that spiritual teachers admit when they are wrong. I was wrong about Jeffrey Martin’s work and, given what I know about the Christian tradition’s insistence on the moral foundations of spiritual development, should have been far more critical of his research agenda.

Mea culpa.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment