Bringing Forth the Mind of
Christ
From Self Consciousness to
Christ Consciousness
Talking about Prayer of the
Heart is always audacious because we are trying to find language for a practice
that makes us accessible to a Reality beyond words. The practice itself is not a concept. It is not a technology that produces
results. You experience it by doing it.
A simple gesture or a hand expression can best express the life of
consecration more so than a thousand words. We bring our hands together in bowing adoration, we extend
our hands open before us in love and self-offering. In this is the totality of
our life of communion in God.
To bring forth the mind
of Christ, the totality of Prayer of the Heart is expressed in the inner
movement of bowing and offering. Whether we are in silence or in daily life
activity, this is what we do ceaselessly in Prayer of the Heart. There is
little over which we have control in life. Yet we can bow endlessly and offer
ceaselessly. This we can always do whether we feel
it or not. It can be, it must be, an act of continual willingness to bow in
presence and adoration and to offer in love and self-giving. To do this is to
receive and to bring forth in our own consciousness, the Mind of Christ Jesus
in the same way St. Paul proclaims in his letter to the Ephesians, “Let the
same Mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” In our present world, change will only happen when
Christians are able to bring forth the Mind of Christ in their own life and in
their humanity. This must of
necessity involve the practice of kenosis, or self-emptying, so that Christ can
live fully in us, the goal of Christian life.
Christ consciousness is the
human mind transformed in the unitive love of Christ. In the Prayer of the Heart we learn to abide in the heart of
Christ while our human mind and consciousness is so infused and transformed in
this communion that our consciousness or soul becomes the vessel of the Mind of
Christ. This is the work of a lifetime. Over time transformative grace infuses
our own human mind with the Consciousness of Christ. We embark on a lifetime of
transition from self-consciousness, from self-absorption, to
Christ-consciousness, Christ-absorption.
Our life in the Way of the Heart is, as the mystics describe poetically
and lyrically, to be thus absorbed. We lose ourselves in the abyss of
Christ. Yeshua promises if
we lose ourselves in Him, we will find ourselves, our true Spirit, our true
identity, our true Mind. Thus is
the nature of transformation in Prayer of the Heart.
In recent years there has
been an explosion of research and knowledge on the workings of the human mind.
In this work when we talk about mind, we’re not just talking about the
biological mechanisms of the mind, of the brain, and perceptual and cognitive
apparatus. When we speak of the
mind in the spiritual sense, we're talking about consciousness, the totality of
the extent of our awakening and awareness of ourselves and the world. We are
speaking of soul. Consciousness inclines us to respond in certain ways or not
respond in other ways. If we look around us it is all too apparent that human
consciousness in the world is broken and afflicted by the human condition. Yeshua and the great teachers of
spiritual traditions say the way we experience the world, ourselves, and others
is filtered and flawed, and results in unneeded suffering. When we have a soul,
or consciousness, that is based on absorption in a separate self, suffering and
evil is perpetuated. When we have a soul based on awakening to unitive love and
communion with the entire universe in God, we perpetuate love and grace. Our
consciousness is affected by the conditioning and influences in our society of
consumerism, addiction, and pervasive self -absorption. Those who “have” never have enough. More is always required and
demanded. As a result so many
persons in our culture draw themselves into a life of frenzy where their true
priorities of the heart are forgotten.
They complain there is never enough time and that they are over-stressed
with the requirements of getting all the things they need and the experiences
they hunger for, and they must work excessively to pay for it all.
The Shrunken Self-Centered
Soul- Source of Evil, Source of Suffering
Therefore we must look in
this mind, in our consciousness, to understand the origins of spiritual suffering.
We’re accustomed to looking around and proclaiming that the problem with our
personal suffering is "out there," when the source of spiritual
suffering is to be found in our own consciousness. Yeshua Himself said that the source of sin, the source of
spiritual suffering, begins in the mind and in our thoughts. He asks us to look
in our own mind where the source of sin and cruelty in the world find their
origin. In our mind is to be found the engine and motivation of endless wars
and endless injustices that fuel war. Intractable injustice occurs in a world
where some have too much and most don’t have enough to meet basic needs.
To be a mystic is to also be
a prophet. Those two modes of
being are not disconnected. Yeshua
is the supreme mystic and prophet who confronts the world with His unitive
vision and asks us to look at our self absorbed viewpoints. He calls us to leap
from our private self preoccupation, as if to say, "In your separateness
you have forgotten who you are. Find yourself in Me. I am the Heart of
Creation.”
In the United States two
percent of the world consume seventy percent of the essential resources of the
world. Yet we are a society fueled bv fears of the affluent not having enough,
while too many of us genuinely go without essential needs. We’re organized around a consciousness
of desiring more, needing more, seeking more, with worry and haste that makes
family life, marital life and spiritual life nearly impossible. We fight wars over the control of
resources to make possible this way of life, a way of life that is
unsustainable and only causes more suffering. Communally and individually, we injure those in the way of
our compulsions and we grasp at perceived wrongs and the desire to
retaliate.
Violence therefore is a product
of the mind, both personally and collectively. We might ask, how can this be? We are ontologically in our being already united with God,
already children of God in our true spirit, the mystics have proclaimed
throughout time. So what is the
problem? Why do we suffer
spiritually and morally, and why do we create suffering for others? This is a vital question to consider.
If we look closely at the condition of human consciousness, is it not a
pervasive state of self-consciousness, a prison of self-absorption for nearly
all? In this instance we are
speaking of the illusory self, the separate self, the mind of separateness and
isolation. This is the mind that creates sin and suffering. It is the mind that
creates an idolatry and worship of the self-created self. To worship and
build a life devoted to this separate self is a blasphemy and desecration of
our essential belonging in the universal Circle of the Divine Beloved, the
"Allaha," or essential Unity we call God, the Abba from Whom all
things arise.
Purification of the Heart-
The Singular Life
The Gospel of Thomas says,
"Many are standing at the door, but only those who are singular will enter
the place of union."(Logion 75) The gift of the Abrahamic Faiths is the
gift of monotheism. God is One. There
is one God and we are one in the one God. All existence proceeds from the one
God. Thomas Merton says that all
evil, all sins come from a betrayal of the first commandment of Moses. All sins in some sense are forms of
idolatry in that we seek outside of God for what God alone can give. The Judaic
tradition understands sin as " missing the mark." Yeshua proclaims to us that to find
completion in life seek all in God, and give all to God, our Source. He invokes the Torah in proclaiming the
great commandment of Love in the Shema', “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is
One." Yeshua says (paraphrase) "You shall give all of your being in
love to the One God.” He is
telling us to do what we most want to do, to be given to this singular desire,
our heart's desire. What we desire
most deeply within us in our own hearts is to give ourselves to the love of God
in entirety. In Yeshua we find our heart's desire.
We may ask, what keeps us
from being singular or undivided, from attaining what the ancients of the desert
called "purity of heart"? I trained for a number of years in the Zen
Buddhist tradition. The Buddhist
religion offers important wisdom teachings to the world and among them is its
analysis of consciousness. The
first Noble Truth in Buddhism is the existence of spiritual suffering. And the
second noble truth of the Buddha is that the sources of suffering are
craving. The historical Buddha
wasn’t talking about physiological cravings; he was talking about misdirected
spiritual craving or longing. The
craving outside of the Divine Oneness, that is, craving or seeking outside of
God, and our oneness in God causes spiritual suffering. This craving arises, he said, from the
illusion of a separate self.
In Christian terms we would
understand that illusion as the sense of alienation or that we are cut off or
separated from God. The Garden of Eden story in Genesis speaks to this
experience of feeling expelled or apart from God. In Christianity we think about religion and spirituality in
relational terms. Too often we project onto religion our own human
relationships that are so broken themselves. Therefore we project upon God this dysfunctional parent who
we must please and appease so we can avoid getting punished and cut off and
condemned. The trust and surrender to be wholly given and singular in our
consecration to God escape us. We remain too often locked into the separateness
and the misdirections, the addictions, which afflict our society. Hence we are inclined to seek outside
of God, what God alone can give. In the words of the Country and Western song,
we are always "looking for love in all the wrong places."
The historical Buddha also
said, in connection with this craving that human beings are locked into
something that in Sanskrit he called "tanha." Tanha means the seeking for private
personal fulfillment. The emphasis
here is on “private personal
fulfillment," the idea that somehow we can through our own devices and our
own self-sufficiency be fulfilled.
Even more so we adhere to the consciousness that there is an isolated
self, that can be fulfilled. If we
think about how pervasive that idea is in the world and in our own minds, it is
startling. Too frequently we even use religion for a kind of private, personal
fulfillment. We look solely for what comforts or consoles the ego, what will
“make me happy” and give me a sense or proprietorship over God. We may try to "cut our own
deal" with God in exchange for our private consolation. This is the broken
afflicted soul that Christ came to heal in us. The Way of the Heart is not
about “self fulfillment;” it’s about self-transcendence, freedom from the
tyranny of the small ego-self and coming home to the Heart of Christ. Yeshua said that evil or sin begins in
the mind. So there must be a
transformation of mind or consciousness. What is the nature of that
transformation and how do we actualize it in our spiritual practice? That's what we need to focus on.
The teaching of Yeshua and
St. Paul and the desert monastics is that the work of life is to bring forth
the Mind of Christ in our own soul.
To transform our own soul, our own consciousness, in the Mind of Christ,
is a lifetime of givenness to the Heart of Christ in the consecrated ceaseless
practice of inner communion with Christ.
Christ consciousness is the mind of compassion, not the mind of
self-fulfillment; the mind of communion, not the mind of self-isolation or
self-absorption. The Mind of
Christ is “Agape," self-offering Love, not self-seeking desire or
consuming, grasping attachment.
Awakening In Christ
The Way of the Heart
therefore must come through self-emptying, self-kenosis, a paradox for our
culture. In the Gospel Yeshua
promises that the relinquishment of this separate self is the way to awaken and
leap into the One Self, that is Allaha, that is Elohim, that is Yahweh; the One
Self from Whom all life, all existence, all Creation arise. Yeshua the Christ is the personal
point of contact, the revelation of this One Self in which "we live and
move and have our being." Communion with Christ is communion with the
Abba, the Allaha, with the Oneness That Is.
This awakened living out of
the state of communion with Christ is the state of being in the Kingdom. While we often think of it as an
intensely personal state, it is also intensely oceanic. When Yeshua was asked, “Where is the
Kingdom?” He used an Aramaic word that means both “within” and “among", as
both are true. So, it would be a mistake to say, “The Kingdom of God is only
‘within’ me.” It would be more in
harmony with the Gospel to say we are in the Kingdom and the Kingdom is in
us. So in Christ may we wake
up! Wake up! Wake up to the Kingdom!
Actualizing the Kenosis of Christ
Kenosis is a term from the
Greek, which Paul used in Ephesians to refer to the life and spiritual
development of Yeshua and therefore ourselves. And the risen Christ continues
to actualize kenosis within us if we are willing. In our release from the consciousness of a separate self we
offer ourselves in totality, our life, our humanity, all of our consciousness,
into the essential Unity which Yeshua knew intimately as Abba. In the Way of the Heart we understand
kenosis as ceaselss bowing and ceaseless offering. Kenosis is not self-negation. It is self-offering and self-surrender
in Love in our communion in Christ.
Ego-Mind
There is nothing wrong with
this little self that we have, but it's not who we are. It’s a fragile little thing and we need
to take care of it. We’d all be in
big trouble if we didn’t have an ego in this world. It’s a vehicle.
It helps us get along. God
made us to have an ego. It helps
us to survive. We need to care for
it, but it must be a servant and not the master. To awaken in Christ is to
uncover our true Master and our True identity.
Ego-mind, is a necessary construct,
a creation of our brain we need in order to have a self in the world. Without an ego, we have no sense of
boundaries. This boundary,
however, is arbitrary and is shaped by history and circumstance. It is inventively formed into the shape
of psyche and personality but this is no eternal soul, this ego. We are inclined spiritualize our ego
and turn it into eternal soul. It
is not our true identity, it is not who we are. Thank God. Our true spirit or heart lies hidden in the bosom
of Christ within us. Our true
spirit is the Imago Dei, the fire of Divine Life, within us, waiting to flame
up in us and expressed in this human life as lit candles of the Light of
Christ.
Mind like Water
In this practice of endless
bowing it is vital to cultivate the practice of attention. The Zen people talk about this practice
of attention and wakefulness as “mind like water.” Water flows. It
doesn’t attach to anything. It
moves around all obstacles and it doesn’t attach. It keeps on flowing.
That is the quality of mind; the quality of attention that we want to
have in both our formal sitting practice and in our daily practice. The mind of
prayer, the mind or consciousness of kenosis, we might say, is the mind of the
water of spirit, the water of presence, terms that have been used in the
Christian tradition. Water of
Presence is the innate quality of Divine life, which emanates from deep within
us. When we open to it, we are
accessible to it. We make
ourselves accessible to it, first of all through our sitting practice of
abiding in the heart and observing the mind. In our observing the mind and the actions and
reactions of the mind, we observe the thought forms which our human minds
create and the organization of the ego self. In learning to see it we find freedom to release and abide
in the depths of Christ in the heart.
Why We Practice
A participant at a Prayer of
the Heart retreat asked once,
“Why? Why are we doing this
practice?” A good question. Why are we? Since we are already children of God, why bother with all of
this? Very important. Those who have walked in this Way of
the Heart say we do it because Christ wants to live in us. Christ wants to be fully alive in us,
and we are happiest when that happens.
And we are most alive and most human when we consecrate our lives to
that transformation.
In order for that to happen,
it takes a praxis, or a liberation from the transitory self-created self, in
order for Christ to live in us fully.
So the real work of soul-making is the work of transformation of
consciousness, realizing and receiving in our own human consciousness, the Mind
of Christ. The praxis must begin with a core
commitment of a consecration of our entire will and humanity – and that is the
inner work to be done.
Therefore to do this practice
is to continually release from every attachment and misdirection of our
attention and will, to return to our true Home in the Heart of Christ in our
own heart. This Christians know and understand as communion with Christ. In
this self-transcendence and freedom of self-release we must bow to the One who
is Home and who is greater than the little self. Ceaseless bowing is the healing balm to the wound of
separateness and the compulsions of the ego-mind. Ceaseless bowing requires us to be awake in Christ's
Presence. Ceaseless bowing takes us to the inner tabernacle of adoration.
In the icon of Christ in
Gethsemane His prayer posture is one of being awake while his friends
sleep. At a moment when his own
human self might want to run away from the horrors and fears that await him, He
is awake. He is fully there. He is open and trembling, and frail and
fragile, just as we are. Yet,
isn’t it often in a crisis that we are most alive, most awake, most in the
middle of life, most attending and accessible to what’s happening?
In our Prayer of the Heart
sitting practice of observing the mind and abiding in the heart we give our
attention fully to presence. We let go of the traffic of the mind to live out
of the past and to let go of the anxiety of a self-seeking future which is
never here. We give ourselves to presence to make an ongoing act of bowing in
Faith and adoration that God is the fullness of Presence in the eternal here
and now. Therefore liberation from
the mind requires us to be able to observe at first. That’s why it is so important. Attention, wakefulness! "Be awake!" Yeshua says, “Be awake! "You know neither the day nor the
hour. Be awake. Keep your lamps
trimmed so that you don’t miss the bridegroom.” In Him we find true liberation from the unconsciousness and
dormancy of the ego-mind.
The Sin of Unconsciousness
Humanity’s great sin is that
we are not conscious, we are not awake to the way things really are. We are too often reacting from the
habitual and unconscious patterns that come to us from our own past. If we consider all the horrific things
that happen in the world, they are the acting out of unconscious and old
patterns. Sadly we are acting out too often the past patterns of cruelty and
violence. If we look in our
families and ourselves, the things that happen that are cruel, that are
uncaring, they are the unconscious acting out of old patterns. Too often we have chosen not to be
awake.
To be awake is to see the
ego-mind and find freedom from it.
We do this in cultivating an interior space of quiet or a state of
called hesychia. This is the state
of interior silence that we create in our sitting practice. It is the necessary base from which we
bring our practice into daily life.
Without this interior stillness we are easily caught up in all of the
painful actions and reactions of relationships that happen in the middle of
life. Daily silent prayer of
inner communion with Christ is essential for this freedom and
transformation. Without our daily
practice inner silence, the quiet dissipates and we are drawn into habitual
patterns of reaction. Things come
at us and we react unconsciously rather than connecting with the reservoir of
interior peace and communion with Christ in the heart. The Life of Christ within
us allows us to be at peace and to respond with the intention of love and
gentleness, kindness and wisdom.
The growing space of our
silent prayer practice allows us to sink into a quiet in which the busy mind
goes on, either in greater or littler degrees, but we experience it
subjectively as having no interior impact. It washes over us as if it were a leaf carried by the
breeze. The traffic of the mind
can be turbulent or relatively calm but it matters not to the contemplative
practitioner. We remain anchored
in our practice of just “seeing” thoughts from a growing center of calm as if
it were the eye of a hurricane that remains calm in the center. Of course, when I say that, we’re all
somewhere in a continuum of interior quiet. Sometimes we’re there and sometimes we’re not there, but we
can always come back. Metanoia is
always possible. Returning as the
prodigal child is always possible a million times in the course of a day to
this interior space of hesychia.
We don’t have to be
identified with our pain and our reactions and our wounds and our unfinished
business. We don’t have to be
captivated by the compulsions and the defenses that go with it. In so doing, we can actually make a
choice to cease from injuring the relational life between ourselves and others.
That is a huge choice. In that
choice we break the cycles of habitual violence and habitual pain that occur in
human consciousness in society. It
all starts with our inner bowing and releasing, and in that inner peace and
space we are able to receive the Mind of Christ.
Ceaseless Bowing
When we speak of endless
bowing in Prayer of the Heart, we are not just speaking of the physical posture
involved in bowing, but rather the interior movement. Certainly physical bowing
in the privacy of our prayer practice is desired and appropriate. Maybe we even should do it more often
in the middle of life. More
outward bowing in Christian life and practice would help us to recognize the
holy Presence of Christ in ourselves, in others, and in the world around us.
Perhaps as time goes on bowing can become a more appropriate expression of our
interior life in Christian community. Bowing is acknowledging inwardly in
reverence the truth of every situation, giving reverence and surrendering,
giving homage to the One who transcends and the One who is our refuge in every
situation. It is the praxis of the
first and the greatest commandment in every situation in life. Bowing releases us from our
identification with the limits of the ego-mind and the little self and engages
us with our life of communion with Christ. In this spaciousness and emptiness we are released from our
involvement in the confines of the habitual patterns of the mind traffic and
re-enter again and again this great spaciousness of Christ's Presence.
Bowing is the perfect practice of monotheism, of taking
refuge in the Holy One of existence in every circumstance of life. That means bowing in our relationships,
inwardly bowing to the people in our life whom we too often de-sacralize. In
our routinized patterns of life we forget who we are and who they are. We
forget that that Christ, Holy One, is present and alive in them and in us. If we were to inwardly bow to our
spouse, if we were to bow to our children, to our friends, how our practice of
reverent love might grow towards them!
We can bow in the middle of
conflict. In the middle of
conflict with our loved ones or strangers, we become the most angry and the
most hurtful. At that moment bowing cuts through the self-absorbed concern and into
the greater concern, which is the
Love of Christ that encompasses us all.
We can connect within that spaciousness and the greater concern to not
injure love. In that moment
of bowing the whole conflict, the whole interaction, can shift in you and in
the person with whom you are in conflict.
The issue is not whether to
be in conflict, but how to be in conflict. We can bow to the greater concern
and Presence of Christ in that circumstance. This doesn’t mean we ignore our genuine need, but so often
what gets addressed and pursued as genuine need really isn’t. Rather it’s what I “want” in order to
be comfortable, and that’s different than what I truly need. When a conflict is escalating, is
precisely the moment when inwardly bowing may lead conflict to de-escalate when
the other in the conflict senses respect and concern.
We bow in our Holy Leisure
receiving in gratitude, receiving without grasping, the pleasures of life and
leisure that come our way, the time that is given us. Sometimes we bow in our
fear. Fear is the most dangerous
of all because, when we are given to fear, we contract, we defend, and
sometimes we attack.
"Pre-emptive war" takes place on many, many levels in our
world. We bow to the deeper refuge who is Christ in our hearts and the fear
loses its power over us.
We can bow in our injuries.
We need not deny our pain but we also need not hold onto and nurture the sense
of injury and identify with victimization. We bow in such a way that we respect
both the hurt and the need for healing. All of us have desires to retaliate
when we are hurt or injured, and we may bow in such a way that we release our
grasp from a desire to hurt in return.
We can also bow when we find ourselves in guilt and shame from wrongs
committed and thereby release from preoccupation so that it doesn’t keep us
from living fully into the present.
True contrition releases us from guilt and shame. True contrition and conversion, true
sorrow helps us awaken and open to the Life of Christ ever arising anew as the
Living Water in the eternal moment.
We bow in sorrow and the freedom of contrition; we bow in the peace of
forgiveness.
To bow in gratitude in our
need and in our human fragility is valuable practice. Our need is always great and our nothingness is always
present with us. In those moments
when we are most aware and most in touch with our need and our emptiness are
the moments when we may be most accessible to all that God wants to give us of
God’s self. In nothingness we realize both our lack of expectation or
entitlement, and our need. In the nothingness of our kenosis we realize that
all is gift, and we are receptive and open to God's Self-Gift in Christ.
Over time our human mind
becomes more and more a servant of this greater spaciousness, freedom, and Love
that is the Mind of Christ. Less and less we are consumed by the ego-mind's
compulsion to be a master and God unto itself. Our human mind is really happier and its inherent insecurity
healed, when it is the servant rather than the master. When we realize the real
false god that we too often worship, we can then throw down the tyranny of the
altars we have built to our ego’s obsession for control.
In the spaciousness of
endless bowing the space for Christ's Agape to be born and to live in us becomes
not only possible but inevitable.
Endless bowing leads to endless adoration and endless offering and
endless consecration. Meister
Eckhart says this about the moment of our spacious receptivity, “God must act
and pour himself into you the moment he finds you ready. Don’t imagine that God
can be compared to an earthly carpenter who acts or doesn’t act as he wishes,
who can will to do something or leave it undone according to his pleasure. It is not that way with God. Where and when God finds you ready, he
must act and overflow into you.
Just as when the air is clear and pure, the sun must overflow into it
and cannot refrain from doing that.”
(Mitchell, The Enlightened Mind, p. 114) It’s an astounding statement. It goes against all of what many of us have been taught
about the nature of God. But what
Eckhart says is the nature of God is self-giving, over-flowing love Whose
nature is to give of Itself to all creatures, all beings. When they are ready to receive there is
no whim of choice. Simply, God
must give of God’s Self. The gift
of God's Self for Christians is Christ. Christ is ready always to pour into our
human mind and consciousness. In my years as a spiritual director I’ve found
that statement to be proven true again and again and again.
Ceaseless Offering
Ceaseless bowing and
Ceaseless Offering are not separate and distinct interior movements, but
together make the praxis of communion with Christ in silence and in activity. The inner work of prayer takes an ongoing effort on
our part to make straight the way of the Lord. We make our life and humanity utterly accessible to God’s
life and grace by releasing from every attachment and misdirection that
impedes. In our bowing endlessly
and releasing from our self-attachment to thoughts we prepare ourselves to be a
vessel to receive God’s presence and Self-gift in Christ. This praxis leads to
what the desert abba, Evagrius, called the state of "apatheia." (not
to be confused with apathy)
Apatheia is a state of freedom from compulsion. Evagrius Ponticus of the fourth century
says in his Pratikos on Prayer, “Now this apatheia has a child, and the child
is called agape. Agape is the
progeny of apatheia. Apatheia is
the very flower of Ascesis."
(Ponticus, p.14) This spaciousness, this receptivity is the condition in
which the Agape of Christ arises within us. Apatheia is one way of stating the quality of openness,
which makes love possible.
Bowing and offering go
together. We bow in adoration, in
love, in reverence for the essence of life and love in Christ who is greater
than our ego-self. And we offer in
love. We bow and we offer. Our offering is our humanity, our
thoughts, our emotions, our efforts, our failings. Most of all, the consecrated self is our offering. Our
ceaseless prayer is "Into you I commend my spirit, into you I commend my
life. "
We offer control. The serenity prayer of Alcoholics
Anonymous is a wonderful prayer.
It has great, great wisdom.
Control is the thing we have the most trouble really giving up. It’s ego's greatest obsession, and
greatest compulsion. The truth is we have no control, the most difficult thing
to accept because the ego-mind stakes its security on having control. Our journey into the Heart of Christ
takes us from the tyranny of the ego's compulsions for control to finding
ultimate security in Christ alone. This alone will heal our fear and give us
true security.
What we can choose to do at all times is to offer ourselves
in an act of consecration in Christ to the One in whom every condition, every
circumstance, every wounded and broken and dimension of life is not beyond
redemption and healing. This we
can always do, when we can do nothing else. In every circumstance we can
"Breathe Yeshua." This offering includes especially our own broken
and wounded minds and psyches.
There is not one among us who isn’t wounded and broken in some way. No dark place in our own psyche and our
own consciousness is beyond redemption. Those are the places in the most need
of offering to the Light and Healing touch of Christ. They are the places we’re
most ashamed of, most afraid to look at, where there is the most pain.
What holds us back too often
from our offering is the judgment of unworthiness. If your own child were to offer a cut or wound or a place that
was in need of healing, would you turn away? Of course not. Such
self-judgements of unworthiness hold us back from making our complete human
self an offering.
In our daily practice there
are many ways we make this offering. Our silent prayer is an offering, a gift
of self in each breath and invocation of the name of Yeshua. In our devotional prayer we offer
ourselves. In our intercessory
prayer, we offer the people, the loved ones, the situations in life; we offer
them all to the Holy One in Christ because we know we have no control. We fear and we worry about what will
happen and what will become of them.
We worry and fear for our country and the world and the people in places
of violence. There’s nothing we
can do except offer all beings and all conditions to the mercy of Christ. When
I do intercessory prayer, I say hardly anything. I simply hold that situation before the Love and Healing
Mercy of Christ with this intention, “Here, I offer this to You. I give it all to Your Greater Concern
and Healing Love.”
In our daily practice we make
the offering of consecrated space, time and intention in our homes and daily
lives. In daily life we can make
the offering of doing what we do with full presence (bowing) and with love
(offering), whether it be eating, whether it be conversation, whether it be
service, whether it be walking, whether it be washing your hands. Each act is
done as presence, as adoration, and as offering in the love of Christ. That is where the practice meets the
road.
In every circumstance
we know that we can’t always fix things; we can't always change them. We can always and in every moment of
life do the best we can in love and make that our offering. We place it on the altar and find peace
that it is enough, because it is enough.
That is the practice of pure Faith. This is "Breathing Yeshua"
each moment of life, trusting that doing the very best we can in love is enough. I
didn’t really understand this central truth until the day arrived when had to
confront my own rage and helplessness with my dying son's illness. There was nothing I could do to stop
his suffering. There was nothing I
could do to change the outcome.
But there was one thing I could do. I could do the best I could to just
walk with him in those last days and be the best father I could be, and love
him the best I could, and that was enough. That is "Breathing
Yeshua."
That offering is “the
little way” of Terese of Lieseux, it is “the little way” of Lawrence of the
Resurrection, it is “the little way” of our Buddhist brother, Thich Nach
Hanh. They have all taught us that
this is the wisdom of living. The
little offering of loving kindness each moment is how we release from our ego’s
agenda and its bondage and return to the Mind of Christ. In this way we awaken and find
ourselves in the Heart of Christ and that find we were never outside of
Christ. We find that our own body
is Christ’s body.
Let me share a reading of St.
Simeon of the tenth century who came into that same insight:
(Mitchell, The Enlightened
Heart, p.38)
“We awaken in Christ’s body,
As Christ awakens in our bodies,
and my poor hand is Christ.
He enters my foot and is infinitely me.
I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of
Him
(for God is indivisibly whole seamless
in God’s Nature)
I move my foot
and at once he appears like a flash of
lightning.
Do my words seems blasphemous? --
Then open your heart to Him.
and let yourself receive
the One who is opening so
deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
we wake up inside Christ’s body.
