Our True Refuge
"Abide
in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit unless it abides
in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the Vine and you are
the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit." John 15:4
Throughout Christianity in
the East and West there is a recurring theme in religious iconography of the
Heart of Christ presented with the hand pointing to the heart or divine Fire
arising from the Heart of Christ. This symbolism points to the centrality of
the heart in Christianity. Even more important is the insight proclaimed that
the Heart of the Universal Risen Christ is the refuge, home, and locus of our
life's completion. For the seeker this insight becomes the core of the journey
in the Way of the Heart.
For those on this journey the
questions we must continually ask ourselves in each moment of life is,
"Where is our true Refuge?" To what do we give our life, unreservedly
and without question? What is the hub around which the wheel of our life turns,
the center of gravity where our life is anchored?" St. Benedict teaches us
in his timeless monastic Rule that
the center of life and the core wisdom of spiritual praxis is this: "Prefer nothing to Christ."
Salvation is correctly
understood as healing, as an annointing salve or balm of the soul. This
spiritual healing happens when our human life and consciousness is realigned,
re-ordered around the Essence of our life, rather than the peripheral and all
too deluded consciousness of our ego-minds. Our human journey is one of going
from "dis-membering" to
"re-membering." Re-membering is to recover what was lost or
make whole what was separate. Hence in the Middle East the practice of
contemplation has often been named the "Re-membrance of God."
Conditioned and
Unconditioned Life
In the Gospel of Thomas (logion 7) Yeshua says, " A lion
eaten by a human being is blessed as it changes to human form, but a human
being devoured by a lion is cursed as a human becomes lion." Our life's
transformation turns on the choice between having our humanity infused and
alive in the Heart of Christ or consumed and overwhelmed by the inclinations of
the ego-mind and our instinctual life. Therefore the real journey is the
divinization of our humanity with its biological instincts, and consciousness.
Through grace the earthen clay of our humanity can become servant of the
spiritual center or Heart, and therefore sacred vessel of the Living God's own
life, the Body of Christ. The Limitless
Unconditioned Life of Christ is our True Life. We were born to live His
Life in ours.
As we go through life
eventually we begin to understand that there are some things in life that just
don't last. Impermanence is linked to every aspect of our incarnate lives. And
yet in the Gospels Yeshua asks us to go beyond the impermanent appearances of
things. We walk in two worlds, the world of conditioned impermanent life and
loss, and the world of spirit and the Divine Eternal. He warns us, (paraphrase) "Don't put great value in
what moth and worm can destroy.
Look for the pearl of great price, and put your trust in what endures,
give up everything else if you really want to give yourself to Me. If you want
to find your Life, you must lose the life of illusion." The habit patterns of a lifetime
must be relinquished. We must
find freedom and detachment with even the most treasured of our familial
relationships. Yeshua invites us to find our home and full refuge in That
which does not fail, His Own Heart.
The ego-mind sees all this
detachment as diminishment and loss.
The Heart sees it as freedom, as finding our way Home. To choose Refuge
in the Heart of Christ is to find our Home, our True Identity, who we truly
are. For as Paul says in
Colossians (2:9-10)" It is in Christ that the complete being of the
Godhead dwells embodied and in Him you have been brought to completion."
Salvation Practice
One way of understanding the
process of salvation in our lives is to continually ask ourselves in every life
dilemma, in every choice we make, in every moment, 'Where is our true Refuge?
In what are we seeking safety, fulfillment, and completion?' This is not always
easy to know, as the ego-mind is so skillful at co-opting even our most sincere
intentions.
The practice of
Christian Meditation, or Prayer of the Heart, therefore, is the practice of
continually seeking refuge in the Heart of Christ. Christian theologians have stated that salvation is
the process of conforming our individual will to the will of God.
Mystical Christianity has
understood salvation to be the full surrender of the self to God in a process
of "uniting our human life and consciousness with Divine Life and
Consciousness." We can define this process of surrender as finding our
true Home and Refuge in the One Life of our belonging, and learning that every
other refuge, really isn't a refuge.
We need no longer "look for love in all the wrong places."
One of the metaphors Yeshua
gives to us in the Gospel is the story of the prodigal child. This wonderful
story of limitless love and mercy depicts the theme of leaving home and finding home. The story
takes us into the human cycle of dissipation of Essence and being restored to
Essence. We are brought into the universal human journey of lostness,
separateness, estrangement, and the journey home to rediscover and abide in the
true Parentage and the Home of our true belonging. To find our true refuge is
to come home to the Heart of Christ again and again. In Breathing Yeshua this
is what we actualize.
Salvation practice is the
practice of the singular commandment of Yeshua who says that everything in the
tradition, in the law, and in the prophets is to be found in the Love of God
and neighbor. We find our capacity for divine Love in the Heart of Christ.
Yeshua says that this great commandment is the only commandment, seeking any
kind of completion in life outside of the Love of God is only a blind alley and
results in our experience of being lost and isolated. The Cistercian monk and mystic writer Thomas Merton said
similarly that there is only one commandment.
All the other commandments are just elaborations; therefore all sins are a form
of idolatry, of seeking outside of God what God alone can give. God alone is
our refuge and Source of completion.
The core of the Christian
Mystery is that we have a doorway, an entrance into the Heart of God. Christ is
the revelation of the Heart of God and the doorway in. In the person of Yeshua
God becomes fully accessible to us; and in our refuge in the universal Heart of
Christ we become accessible and divinized in the God of Mystery. This God
of Mystery, the Life of Allaha, the Essential Unity from Whom all things arise
flows through us as the life-giving blood in our veins.
Leaping into the Great
Circle of the Heart of Christ-
For Christians this process
of divinization happens in a life consecrated in Christ. Through our devotional
love for the personal Yeshua we enter into the universal Christ who is the
Great Circle of our belonging in our practice of Refuge in the Heart of Christ.
As we find our refuge and belonging in Him, we are, in the words of Paul-
"… one person in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28) We are the One
person" in whom all things are made, and all things have their
being." (John 1:3)
To take refuge in the Heart
of Christ is an actualization of this Mystery in every difficult circumstance
in Life. And is it not in crisis, when the ground is shifting, when our
established patterns no longer work, that we make those leaps of Refuge in His
Heart? Fear arises and we can do nothing about that. We can find a way to be
with fear, so that it doesn't control us, so that we can choose our true refuge
in the middle of fear. These are the true moments of conversion and opening. In
that moment of choice when we take refuge we become servant and companion with
the Eternal One in our own Hearts, within and among us." Whoever serves me
must follow me, and where I am, will my servant be." (John 12:26)
Meeting the every day
dilemmas of life with our practice of Refuge in the Heart of -Christ takes us
from the life of limits and conditions and impermanence into Limitless Life.
Such a moment came in my work one day as a geriatric mental health clinician
when I was called to consult in the case of a woman in a nursing home who was
rapidly declining from depression. When I arrived she was already dying from
onset of pneumonia. There was nothing I could do as a professional, and there
was nothing anyone could do at this stage to prevent her death. I reached for
the Limitless in that situation and asked her if she was afraid. She said
"yes," and I took her hand and talked with her for while. I prayed with her and in my interior
prayer offered my own communion with the Heart of Christ to this woman. I had
nothing to give but the quality of my presence and practice of refuge in the
love and Heart of Christ. And it
was enough; it was sufficient.
The practice of Refuge
in the Heart of Christ comes with meeting the every day dilemmas of life,
releasing from the mind's compulsion for control and being given to the Heart's
willingness to love. That is the ground of our transformation, those are the
moments of our conversion. Such
dilemmas happen when:
We risk disapproval and
rejection for the sake of truth.
We risk emotional insecurity
and safety for the sake of love and compassion.
We risk temporal security in
things for the greater security of belonging in Christ.
We challenge the culture and
risk attack and persecution around us for the sake of the integrity of Christ's
Love.
In such moments our own thoughts and emotions will fail
us. If we take our refuge in the mental and emotional
patterns of a lifetime, they will fail us and draw us back into the same dead
ends. We will remain trapped in our habitual patterns of fear and illusions of
control. Such a moment came for me when I held the body of my dead child when
he died from Leukemia, and the opening to leap into the Limitless was given me.
The limit of death for us is often the greatest limit. To take refuge in the
Limitless Heart of Christ in such a moment is our sole refuge.
In such moments we are called
to lay down our life of refuge in pleasant feelings and the addictive patterns
and behaviors which feed them. We lay down the compulsion to re-create them
again and again where they lead us, far from finding true security and
fullness.
In such moments our self
defense patterns and protective mechanisms will lead us to react in ways that
may create harm or injury, or at best greater rationalizations of our habitual
patterns. And we are called into the new life of forgiveness and open handed
offering. We release into the
freedom of the present moment where our humanity is offered in love to the One
who is Limitless Life.
In those moments fears arise
and our only strength is the rootedness of our Praxis of Refuge in the Heart of
Christ. We learn to ride out the fear.
Like Yeshua we may say, "Let this cup pass" but let our prayer
be "my sole Refuge is Your Heart O Christ." In those moments the
strength of our consecrated presence and self-offering, our practice of Refuge
in the Heart of Christ, is our anchor and carries us through the emotional
storms of anger or fear, and He quiets the storm, saying "Fear not."
In all of this we are never
alone, never abandoned. Yeshua makes us this promise:
"Yet I am not alone
because the Father is with me. I have said this to you, so that in Me you may
have peace. In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have
overcome the world." John 16:32 Yeshua, the Christ, who is unconditional
Life and Love, has overcome all conditions and His Heart is our Refuge.
Even
as we confront death, our death or the death of our loved ones, in our Refuge
in the Heart of the Deathless One we touch Eternity, and Eternity touches us,
We come home to Eternal Life as our True Life, a Life that is indestructible,
deathless, unchanging. This is the Life that Yeshua came to give us His very
own Life, His very Own Heart. "I came that they should have Life, and
have it abundantly." (John 10:10
He shares his Life of Love
with us without reservation: "As the Father has loved me, so I have
loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my
love, just as I have kept the Father's commandments and abide in His love. I
have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy
may be complete." (John 15:9-11)
Our sole and
essential commandment from Yeshua
is to take refuge, to abide ever in His Love. This is the ceaseless
practice of Prayer of the Heart.
Brother
Roger of Taize speaks of our act of commitment, our consecrated "Yes"
to Christ in this way:
"One day you
understood this, that without your being aware of it, a yes had already been
inscribed in your innermost depths. And so you chose to go forward in the
footsteps of Christ, a choice no one can make for another. In silence and in
the presence of Christ, you hard Him say, "Come, follow me: I will give
you a place to rest your heart.
And so you are led to
that audacity of a yes that lasts until your dying breath."
( Brother Roger, p.46)
Our Yes to Christ
Our "Yes" to Christ
comes when we drop the little circle of our prisons of separateness and leap
into the universal circle that is the Heart of Christ. An important leap for me
occurred on the occasion of the crisis of the terminal illness of my infant
son. In August 1980 I found myself walking the corridor of the Dohrenbecher
pediatric unit of Oregon Health Sciences Center. My son had been diagnosed with
acute myelocytic leukemia and he had been started on aggressive chemotherapy
that was quickly poisoning his little one year old body. I pulled a small red
wagon behind me where he sat upright with an IV bottle attached running the
chemotherapy poison into the arm I had held and kissed so many times. In a
state of mental torment my mind flooded with a thousand crazy thoughts stirring
anger and fear. A fantasy gripped me of scooping up my beloved little boy and
running out of the hospital to Mexico where he could be treated and cured
without torture, and with a hope this doctor and this hospital didn't offer. The
oncologists cold voice still cut like a knife, promising no more than a couple
of "good" years if my boy went into remission.
Every evening after dinner at
this time, a caravan of young children with terminal illness trooped around and
around. In defiance of their condition they pedaled tricycles, pulled wagons,
and little toys on strings. I was in that caravan and fighting it, telling
myself again and again, "My boy, Carlo, isn't one of them. He's not going
to die." The inner struggle reached a point of paralyzed tension and I
pulled the wagon over to an alcove in the corridor. I was in torment. Sinking into my meditation practice to
find a whisper of quiet and peace, I heard the Beloved's voice. He said, "Look into his
eyes." I turned to look into
my beloved son's eyes. They were very clear and peaceful. They spoke a simple
and clear question, " Will you walk with me through this, or are you going
to run away from it?" There are a millions ways to run away.
The whole question was made
clear and the answer was a resounding "yes." There was nothing I
could do to save my son from death. But I could choose to walk with him and
love him the best I could. To avoid and resist the fact of his illness and
probable death would be abandonment. To love is to hurt; to love is to be in
the fullness of Life. A joy beyond
description rose up in me and I knew nothing could take this "yes"
from me. I rejoined the circle of ill and dying children and knew Carlo and I
were and always will be in that circle of children. It is the circle of the
Heart of Christ and we can leap there with every step in this life. The Heart
of Christ is the Heart of God, is the Heart of the Universe. There is our home
and belonging.
Heart of Christ- Heart of
All Existence
When we leap into this
Circle, we awaken to the Mystery of Existence, "God so loved the world
that he gave his Only Begotten Son."(John
3:16) The truth of Christ as God's gift of His own Self to us becomes
true. The Living Word does truly
become Flesh and dwells among and within us. The Allaha, Source of All, pours out Its own Essence of
Self-Giving Love in Christ to us. From this Source we are loved into existence.
In becoming conscious creation in the Heart of Christ the Redeemer, in the
Spirit, we become gift and self-offering to enter the Mystery of the Abba who
has birthed us and receives us home Unto Himself. This is the Trinitarian
Mystery of Love, the Circle that encompasses all Circles.
Isaiah 55:10- “For
as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until
they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to
the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my Word be that goes out from my
mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I
purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it."
In loving Yeshua we become
fully whole and human in form and flesh; in the Heart of Christ we open to the
oceanic and universal Heart of Being Itself who transcends all form and
substance. This is the rhythm of the cataphatic and apophatic, form and
formlessness, in the spiritual journey of each day. We are all the Word of God
in Christ.
Celtic Christianity has
offered us a resolution of the dualism that has pervaded so much of the
Christian world. The Celtic Christians in the time of their development
independent from the Roman church drew on indigenous mysticism and folk wisdom.
They understood clearly that the Christ of history and scripture is also the
Christ of their hearts, the Christ that is the Light of all Creation before
Creation came into being. "The Christ who is with His people in the quiet
of the windless sea, is with them in the midst of the wild wintry storm. The
Christ who is within, at the center of their spirit, is the Christ who is to be
looked for in friend and stranger, Christ at the heart of all life."
(Newell, p. 26) In Celtic
Christianity therefore we not only believe that Christ is the Light of the
world in some abstract sense but that true salvation and spiritual path in the
words of Celtic theologian, John Scotus Eriugena, is "the true beholding
of the Light from the inner eyes." (Newell, p. 37) This vision of the
universal and personal Christ as Heart and Light of the world, is articulated
further in the scientific mind and mystical vision of the Jesuit philosopher
and anthropologist, Pierre Teihard de Chardin. De Chardin sees a universe
moving toward an Omega point where the fullness of the Light of Christ is
manifested in all incarnate creation. This cosmic, universal Christ De Chardin
proclaims, is the true pantocrator (ruler of the universe) depicted in the
icons of Eastern Christianity (see cover of this book). "Glorious Lord
Christ, the divine influence secretly diffused and active in the depths of
matter, and the dazzling center, where all the innumerable fibers of the
multiple meet; power as implacable as the world and as warm as life; You whose
forehead is of the whiteness of snow, whose eyes are of fire, and whose feet
are brighter than molten gold; you whose hands imprison the stars; You who are
the first and the last, the living and the dead and the risen again; You who
gather into your exuberant Unity every beauty, every affinity, every energy,
every mode of existence; it is You to whom my being cried out with a desire as
vast as the universe, 'In truth you are my Lord and my God.' " (De
Chardin, p. 132)
Dissolving into the Heart
of Christ
In 1987 I received a teaching
that I will only attempt to live for the remainder of my days. On one of those
occasions of exasperation that nearly everyone encounters on the journey I
asked a question in prayer, pointed in the Divine's direction, yet hardly
expecting an answer: " Oh, what's the matter with my life anyway?"
The answer came in the form of a vision and an experience. The first part was
vision: I found myself walking along a long dirt road. There were countless
numbers of persons walking alone or together on this road. I found myself
walking behind three companions. The middle one stopped and turned to face me.
He was Yeshua. His eyes of compassion pierced me through and through and He
reached to touch me in the heart. He leaned forward and whispered to me,
"There's an empty place here, Bill." At His touch a lightning bolt
surged through me and the vision changed to formless, imageless, unmediated
experience. The "I" of Bill, dissolved into the Heart of Christ, and
in this dissolution came a union with the Heart of Christ within all things,
"the One in whom all things came into being."
It is hard to know whether any time lapsed. When the
"I" of Bill came back to awareness, there was just astonishment and
joy. In the years that have passed I have come to realize, knowing or not, we
are all on the road to Emmaus. The One we seek is the One who walks
with us. We recognize Him in the burning of our hearts, and the ancient
practice of Breathing Yeshua, in the ceaseless bowing and ceaseless offering of
ourselves to Him in love.
Beloved Yeshua, You are My Heart's Desire, I
take refuge only and always in Your Heart."
In the Way of the Heart the universal and oceanic
Heart of Christ is our heart's desire and true refuge and encompasses all of
existence.
*****************************************************************
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