Healing from a Divided Life
“ Hear O Israel, the Lord, our God is
One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul
and with all your mind, and with all your strength. You shall love your
neighbor as yourself. This is the greatest commandment.”
(Mark 12:29)
Throughout the Gospels Yeshua
challenges us to be complete, to be undivided, to be wholehearted in our life
of consecration to God. The first
and primary of these is his invocation of the Jewish 'Shema'. And He affirms
that to be given in love to God in entirety is the whole of the law and
scriptures, including the love of neighbor. Other examples include the story of
the rich young man (Matt. 19:16) who comes to Him seeking the truth of
salvation. He tells the young man that he cannot hold back. He must give it all to be one with God. In the teaching of God and Mammon
(Matt 6:24) Yeshua tells us we must choose between our misdirected desire for
wealth and security and our true desire for God. We cannot do both, we cannot
lead a divided life and still enter the Kingdom of unitive love. We cannot have
God and god substitutes. We cannot worship God and idols of our construction.
In the story of Martha and Mary(Luke 10:38) Yeshua admonishes Martha, not
because she is serving by doing manual work, but because she is creating a
duality in herself and is divided in what she is doing, and therefore envious
and resentful. The "better part" that Mary has chosen is her undivided
devotion, a devotional love that can be undivided in both activity and
stillness.
One of the most intriguing
narratives of the mystical life of communion in Christ is the story of the
Samaritan woman at Jacob's well:
John 4:6- “ It was about noon…. A
Samaritan woman came to draw water and Yeshua said to her, “ Give me a drink.”
The Samaritan woman said to him, “ How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of
me, a woman of Samaria?”.. Yeshua answered her, “ If you knew the gift of God
and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink’ you would have asked him
and he would have given you living water. The woman said to him, “Sir you have
no bucket and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you
greater than our ancestor Jacob who gave us the well and with his sons and
flocks drank from it?’ Yeshua said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water
will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water I will give will never
be thirsty. The water that I will give them will become in them a spring of
water gushing up in eternal life.”
What is the point of this
story? Yeshua is telling us lyrically and metaphorically, 'If you want to come
to completion in me, then give yourself entirely, and stop looking around for
substitutes in different sizes and shapes of "buckets."
The True Spouse and the
Living Spring
Beatrice Bruteau, the
contemplative writer, gives a wonderful exegesis of this encounter. (Bruteau,
"Living Prayer", July-Aug. 1995) She begins by noting that in the scriptures when the scene is
dramatically introduced as "high noon" and has related
incongruities (i.e. a single woman coming to get water alone at noon,
speaking with a strange man), these are a distinctive red flags that what is coming in the narrative is not
about historical record but is rather revelation of Mystery. High noon is the
hour of tension when Truth is revealed. The facts of the story are stated in
paradoxical fashion to set the stage for the revelation to follow. There are
multi levels of meaning. A conversation about drinking water turns into a
conversation about Ultimate Reality and mystical union. Buckets, wells, and
springs are metaphors for the Inner life of the Divine. The Samaritan woman is
"us." Like her we have undergone levels of failed or false espousal
in our life. All of us have gone through the espousals of our soul or spiritual
consciousness in the six levels of attachment and are seeking a liberation at
last in the One who invites us Home, the One who is the Gift of God
In the course of a lifetime
we espouse ourselves to what we think will bring us completion. The levels of
espousal in our life are the spiritual developmental journey. Bruteau suggests
this developmental process is analagous to the Eastern chakra system. Christ is
both the true Spouse, the Beloved, who brings us to the final liberation, and
the Font of Living Water of the “I AM” who flows freely within us poured out in
eternal Self-giving Love. We can at long last give up our wandering and seeking
and be Home in the life of inner Communion in Christ.
We might ask ourselves what
are the false substitutes, the buckets, to which we have espoused ourselves?
What must we do to be free to unite with the true Spouse? So often a seeker
begins the journey asking "How can I fit a spiritual practice into my
life?" As the journey progress the entirety of our life, all of our human
development, physical, relational, affective, intellect, and intuition are
integrated into a whole and holy offering of self in communion in Christ. This
is the consecrated life. This is the real meaning of Healing or Salvation, the
assimilation of our complete humanity, will and consciousness, into Christ, our
True Spouse.
Our inner work then is to let
Christ unite and heal our life heal of inner divisions. In doing this we must
confront and free ourselves from what the Buddhist teacher, Joseph Goldstein,
calls, "If Only Mind."
Our mind thinks, "If only this were different, if only I had this bucket,
If only I had this relationship. If only I had this role. If only these
conditions were different."
Much of our life we spend in "bucket consciousness": Love is
limited, God is limited, and my own devices and strategies are my refuge."
The only espousal then is to the objects of desire, my god substitutes, my
self-created "buckets."
By contrast our practice must
take us toward Living Spring consciousness: "Love is limitless and the
Source is within me. Divine Life, the Living Water of Christ, is beyond my
control yet I can open and be accessible to It." Entering the practice of
Christ's kenosis of self emptying and self-offering, I become an empty and
receptive vessel of the Living Spring of Christ's Spirit to suffuse my humanity
and pour out into the world.
To expand and deepen the life
of daily practice we begin by having sacred space for our prayer practice, our
space of intimate communion with the Spouse. We invoke a prayer of consecrated
intention before our silent prayer and at intervals in the day. (How different
our world would be if every home had this sacred space at the center!) We return and anchor ceaselessly in our
prayer word of Breathing Yeshua. If we are espousing ourselves to the Beloved,
we call the Beloved by name and bring ourselves to the Beloved’s Presence. This
we do in Breathing Yeshua endlessly.
And we do this in every activity of life, consecrated eating, sleeping,
relating, work, all of life, in activity and rest, becomes bowing in
adoration and self-offering in love.
In our self-offering we learn gradually to release from self-preoccupation and
to become the clear and empty vessel of the Living Water of Christ. In us He
rises to offer His Life of Love into the world in kindness, service, and life
of inner communion expressed and actualized in every moment.
This is the true
worship of God in Spirit and Truth Yeshua foretold to the Samaritan woman. This
is the Mystery of the Eucharist in Christ's gift of Self to us as the Bread of
Life, and our self-offering to Christ in the transformative consecration of the
elements of our humanity. In this way our life's journey in following Christ is
to become Christ, the consecrated bread and wine of our humanity. In this way
our life is consumated in the true espousal with Christ and we fulfill the
words of the Song of Solomon: "My Beloved is mine and I am His."
"Through Christ,
with Christ and In Christ..
our humanity is
lifted up
and consecrated in
the Beloved;
thus entering the
stream of the Beloved's Life
in adoration and self
giving;
we sit at the Wedding Feast of Eternal Life."
(Ryan, p.74)
