Breathing Yeshua

Christ the Companion

2012-01-24T13:12:00.000-08:00

Christ the Companion

Paul Romans 8:38-39 " For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God, in Christ Jesus, our Lord."

The Way of Devotional Love

It is a great support to have a spiritual director or a contemplative teacher who helps us be accountable to develop a daily spiritual practice in our life, to keep showing up day in and day out. The truth is any relationship withers if we don’t give the gift of our time and the fullness of our attention and our intention. If we really want to develop a friendship or a love relationship, what do we do? We spend time. We make a point to "clear the deck" and everything else is placed out of the way. We create a sanctuary of consecrated space where we can just be with our beloved or our friend. What we intend is this: "I'm just here. I just want to receive you and give you the gift of my self, my presence." This self-giving with God, is the communion we long for. In the same moment this total presence and gift of self requires a letting go in total trust. In the previous chapter we discussed this word in the tradition for letting go, we call it "kenosis." Kenosis makes us present and ready to walk with Christ, our life-long companion.

We have become a culture that is involved in narcissism to the nth degree. In this consumer society we have come to worship the delusion that completion in life comes through a kind of private, personal fulfillment of possession or taking what we think we need from outside of ourselves. " If I just have this, if I just have that, if I just have the right relationship, if I just have the right job I’m going to be fulfilled." So one's life becomes a frenzy of getting the right kind of things, or the right kind of relationship, or the right kind of experiences. And heaven help anyone who gets my way! That’s self-absorption, that’s narcissism; and that kind of pure self-idolatry is the source of every evil in the world.

The spiritual author M. Scott Peck has called evil malignant narcissism. What Yeshua is asking is just the opposite, not private, personal fulfillment, not self-fulfillment, but self-transcendence through self-giving love. He invites us to go beyond the confines of this self, this illusion of a separate self. We do this self-release and self-offering with these empty hands. The hands that grasp so tightly must unclench and release from the things that we cling to as God substitutes for our private, personal fulfillment. Instead, Yeshua says, "Come, enter into the stream of Divine life beyond the confines of our self-made self." This is the Realm of His Heart, the Kingdom of His all- encompassing Love. In doing this we don’t lose our true self. We find our true self, we find our true spirit in the Heart of Christ. In this self-offering the hand opens and offers all that we are in love, making us ever receptive, present, able to receive the gift of God, God's own Self in Christ, our life companion. If we are frightened and grasping, if we're holding on, if we're self absorbed, we're not there. We're not accessible. And to be accessible to God's Self -Giving is the whole purpose of a spiritual practice.

In retreats I frequently place on an altar another icon drawn by Brother Claude. In the icon Yeshua is seated, extending his arms around the beloved disciple, John. John is extending his hands forward in a gesture of offering to Christ. A blue color of divinity extends from Christ’s mantle and envelopes the shades of it around the apostle, John. The blue of divinity and red of humanity become intertwined in this embrace. The icon expresses a delightful intimacy. Often in the Celtic tradition the apostle John is the apostle who is seen as possessing the authority of Christ because he listens and hears the Heart of Christ, his head on the Savior's chest. The beloved disciple is a symbol of ourselves who walk and live in the embrace of Yeshua. In this image we see our opening to receive Christ's divinity and the self-offering of our humanity. Our self-emptying makes us receptive and accessible to receive the fullness of Christ, and to give the fullness of our life to Him. This is a life of companionship and intimacy with Him.

A Life of Companionship and Communion with Christ

Prayer of Consecration

In the Hindu tradition there is a stream of spiritual practice called Bhakti Yoga. Yoga means connection or communion and Bhakti Yoga is the devotional practice of communion with the Divine. Devotional self-giving love for Christ is a powerful aspect of Prayer of the Heart. There are different ways of cultivating devotional love. Among them is a daily prayer of consecration. The Prayer of Consecration is a way that you express in words, your love commitment daily to Christ. The essence of the prayer in your own words is " I love you, Yeshua, and I give myself to you." This is not unlike the love commitments we renew with out loved ones when we say, "I love you." The words that you would use must be your words coming from your own heart and your own experience through your own expression. It is both powerful and transforming at the very beginning of the day as you sit down to do your silent Prayer of the Heart, to say, “O, Beloved, Christ, I give myself to you. Take my life and make it yours.” It establishes us in our intention of devotional love. This praxis connects our Heart's desire to its true completion in Yeshua. To find intervals throughout the day where we can repeat that prayer re-anchors us in that intention. Returning to our Prayer of Consecration grounds us again in our very motivation for living. "Why am I here? What am I doing? What is all of this for anyway?" When we are in full harmony with our central purpose, our life becomes powerful and purposeful. Our practice pulls us out of the unconscious inclination of the mind where we coast along the lines of least resistance and comfort; and it re-anchors us in aliveness in the Heart of Christ.

The Holy Name of the Beloved

Human beings have had a practice across traditions of a reciting the name of the Beloved One. This is especially true in the monotheistic traditions, Christian, Jewish, and Moslem. In the Christian tradition we personalize the name of the Holy One using the name of Jesus or Yeshua. When you are really in love with someone in a relationship, powerfully in love, the name of the one you love is powerful. It connects you. So invoking the name of your beloved brings up the desire that you have to be one with him/her, to give yourself in love. For that reason the ancients discovered that communion with Christ and transformation in Christ arose through invoking the name of Yeshua in silent prayer and in the midst of activity throughout the day. This invocation synchronized with breath became a central expression of Prayer of the Heart. It can find liturgical and joyful expression in chanting in groups or alone as well.

Icon Gazing

Another way to cultivate devotional love is icon gazing. Icon gazing is not intended to be a way to engage the imagination and think wonderful thoughts about Christ. Rather it is a way to let go of the imagination and receptively receive the self-communication that Christ offers to you through the icon. Icon gazing is an intuitive, receptive process, and naturally the communication will not be experienced the same for any two people. We use the visual image of Yeshua to go beyond image to the transcendent experience of the mystical Christ. In the Gospel Mary of Magdala, upon encountering the risen Christ, says, “Master.” She is admonished to not cling to the form or the image. Yeshua says, “Do not cling to me.” He seems to be saying to Mary and to us, " Who I am is much deeper and truer than this form." The mystery of Christ is much bigger than our ideas of Christ, our images of Christ. The mystery of Christ is Divine Life itself. Therefore in this practice, like Mary of Magdala, we release from emotion and imagination to a sacred and empty receptivity to receive Christ’s self-communication to us through the icon.

Conversation with Christ

Another form of daily companionship is our inner conversation with Yeshua. Sometimes it takes the form of words. Often it is a wordless conversation. We share the experience and the challenge of our daily life with Christ. We know we have a place of unconditional acceptance and wisdom where our life is brought daily and offered.

Sanctuary and Protection in Christ

All of us need to find inner safety and protection when we feel at risk, physically or spiritually vulnerable. How we find ultimate security when life is filled with threat or risk is an essential interior movement in the spiritual life. How we find protection from temptation and spiritual fears is how we take refuge in Christ our Companion. Prayer of the Heart is the growing discovery of the experience of inner sanctuary and protection in Christ. All of us have the need to experience protection because the world is often a difficult and dangerous place and there are forces and experiences that are injurious to our spiritual nature. Some prayers in the ancient Celtic folk tradition express this protection in Christ in that they are encircling prayers. They speak of being encircled and shielded in the love of Christ. Here is one about shielding others:

May those without shelter be under your guarding this day, O Christ.

May the wandering find places of welcome

O, Son of the tears of the wounds of the piercings

May your cross this day be shielding them

Here is an encircling prayer of protection for oneself:

My Christ, my love, my encircler

Be near me, each day, each night, each light, each dark

Be near me; uphold me, my treasure, my truth

These kind of prayers or just invoking the name of Yeshua or a short prayer of protection, such as, "O, Yeshua, you are my refuge and my strength. O, Yeshua, shield me from harm." are excellent forms of guard of the heart practice. Guard of the heart describes an ancient practice of protection of our spiritual center. When we do spiritual practice of inner transformation in Prayer of the Heart in many ways we become much more sensitive to the world around us. We become more open to people around us, to the feelings, the thoughts, the energies around us. Thus we have to take more responsibility to take care of our spiritual nature and to protect the heart from what is negative, intrusive, or violent. Guard of the Heart (Ryan, p. 84) is a needed aspect of Prayer of the Heart practice, and prayers of protection with Christ, our ceaseless Companion, are an essential aspect of our daily practice.

Restoration and Consolation in Christ

Yeshua said, “Abide in me." In other words, “Rest in me. I am your refuge. I am the one who will restore you.” So give restoration time with Christ each day, of letting everything else go to be with Christ to restore your soul. For some lighting a candle and reclining on the floor in your prayer space with the intention, “I want to be with you, I need to be with you,” will bring the peace and healing we need for the day, a peace the world cannot give.

Inner guidance with Christ

Most of us think that we have to know what we ought to be doing in our lives. We have to be in charge and competent all the time. We think we ought to be "on top of it" and we push our agenda about what is supposed to happen. If we really want to be open to receive guidance, particularly spiritual guidance, we have to have something the Zen people call, “don’t know" mind. A “don’t know” mindset means that you accept you really don’t know. If you don’t know, that means you are open to be surprised. It means you’re willing to let go of your agenda and surrender to the love and will of Christ. I saw an older lady in her mid-eighties not long ago who thought she might be close to death. Later she was told that maybe she wasn’t close to death because her cardiac surgery was successful. She said, “Darn it, I don’t know what to do. I thought I was preparing for death and now it looks like it’s not going to happen. What am I supposed to do?” So I started talking to her about “don’t know mind” and she thought that was just great. When we really want guidance, we ask because we don’t know. We ask from receptivity, from trust. Yeshua said, “Seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you, ask and you shall receive.” (Matt. 7:7) He didn’t suggest we ask and take the advice when it compares favorably with what you already have in mind. So letting go of our agenda, letting go of our expectations is difficult inner work because of the mind's compulsion for control. The fullness of trust and refuge in the One in whom we abide and find our true Life is a different direction, a direction that takes us to surrender and Home.

Communion with Christ the Life-Long Companion

In this companionship the great, great blessing is that we are never alone. We are never abandoned; we are never unloved; we are never rejected. Christ is the Faithful companion who says, “I am with you always.” (Matt. 28:20) No exceptions exist here. He promises, "I am with you always." Personal intimacy with Christ alone opens us to intimacy with Christ in all Creation. "All things came into being through him and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being was Life and the Life was the light of the people. ´(John 1:3-5) It doesn't get any more intimate than this. Gregory of Nazaianzus says, “Christ exists in all things that are." (Ryan, p.31) When we are personally intimate with Christ, we are in communion with Christ in all things.

Laurence Freeman O.S.B. the great teacher of Christian meditation says this about union with Christ in a lifetime of companionship, “The Kingdom which Jesus taught and embodied in his relationship with us liberates us from individuality as separateness into individuality as indivisibility. In the Kingdom we pass from psychological isolation to spiritual union. It is the end of individual history as we imagine it. The breaching of the wall of the ego is an eschatological moment and end of time and an entry into timelessness. But we experience it in time and therefore it changes the way we live in time. The sorrow inherent in knowing myself as being only and forever just 'me' yields to welcoming a new identity gained in a sharing of being. On one side of the wall of the ego, individuality means merely separateness. On the other side the meaning changes to union. All relationships from the most intimate to the most impersonal are transformed by breaking through the wall of the ego. …. Here, through this aperture in our egoism, at this frontier of our identity, where the question, ‘who am I?’ becomes a pure experience of Reality.” (Freeman, p. 235)

We recognize the presence of the risen Christ is the experience of our true identity. That unitive experience of awakening to the risen Life of Yeshua as one's own Life is an experience of being always home. Wonderfully this experience of oneness with Christ is summarized in St. Paul to the Galatians (3:29): “You are all one person in Christ Jesus.”

Joyfully, amazingly, we are never alone.

Christ the Master

2011-06-18T19:41:00.001-07:00

Christ the Master

Icons are wonderful ways in the Christian tradition of communicating spiritual realities without the mediation of conceptual thought, using visual image instead. To gaze upon the icon without analysis or discursive thought can be a way to receive a more direct intuitive contemplative communication. In a recent retreat I used two icons written by Brother Claude OSB of Mt. Angel, Abbey in Oregon. One of the icons is a representation of the ancient Christ Pantocrator image and illustrates Christ pointing with his right hand to the heart and holding the Torah in his left. Together the gestures speak of the origin of spiritual authority, Divine Love in the Heart of Christ.

The Heart in the tradition speaks to what is essential, what is the true Spirit within us, the life of God within us. And for us it is the Heart of Christ who manifests the Heart of the Divine. For Christians the Heart of Christ is the anchor and source of authority. The Heart of Christ is the Life of the Master, and it is the Heart of Christ that guides us and holds us accountable to the authority of Love. In relational life all of us need to be held accountable to an authority that is higher than our own ego, and we need a Life and Power that is ultimately trustworthy. In the spiritual life we need to find our only sure guidance and a refuge to which we can fully surrender. Certainly if we’ve lived long enough we have learned through bitter experience and error that our own ego-mind is not a very good guide in life. We also need a personal experience of God to encourage and support us and open us to the power of love in the spiritual life. Both of those aspects of Christ the Master and Christ the Companion are manifested in my altar icons and are central to the Christocentric character of Prayer of the Heart practice.

Breathing Yeshua- Actualizing Christ

I’d like to share some thoughts with you about Prayer of the Heart practice and these aspects of who Christ is in our journey into God. I’ll start with a basic understanding of what the language of Prayer of the Heart practice is. Practice here means “praxis” and that means to actualize, to express what is real, what is ontologically real, to actualize it in our humanity and in our human life. So the Prayer of the Heart practice is an actualization of the essential truth of our human life and its ontological unity with Divine Life. It’s very important to think beyond any notion that this is a kind of method or technique. Prayer of the Heart practice is an actualization, manifesting and making real, what is already a hidden truth. Prayer of the Heart is a Way, a path, and we are people of the Way. Whatever we do as method is simply a "way" to become accessible to what is, to the "Isness" of the "I AM." For Christians Yeshua the Christ is this Way.

For a Christian the Divine mystery is revealed both in the personal and the individual historical Yeshua and in the risen and mystical universal Christ. The nature of God is both intensely personal and intimate, and oceanic and all encompassing. Both are true. We are human and in a human face we find the ultimate mystery approachable. In Christ our mistaken illusion of a barrier disappears and we enter into the life of the Trinity, the Christ life, consciously and intentionally in this human life. Our praxis of the Prayer of the Heart, therefore, is uniting our life utterly with the life of Christ so that our humanity is wholly infused and alive in Christ, a state of complete and utter receptivity and self-gift in love. This is the consecrated life that Yeshua reveals to us and invites us to. The Prayer of the Heart is the actualization then of this consecrated life of communion in Christ. It’s not just sitting down in silence for 25 minutes once or twice a day. It’s every moment and every breath of every day.

The next question may be, “That's well and good, but how do we live this life, how do we make it real?” One way to express this directly and without abstraction or analysis is maybe to hold our two hands out in front of us. When we do this, the palms are outward and upward, open and empty, and they release everything in their grasp. They are ready to receive the gift of God’s own self, the Christ life. They are ready to offer in Christ our human life. This simple expression, this simple metaphor, this simple actualization, is the meaning of our existence. It is the meaning of the Eucharist that we celebrate ritually. This is the ontological reality we live, and we can live this reality consciously and intentionally in the praxis of Prayer of the Heart.

Prayer is this same release into Divine Reality and the receiving of the Divine Reality into our life. Like the woman at the well we are invited to awaken and to receive the gift of God and all we must do is open and receive. Yeshua said, “If you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, ‘give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” (John 4:10) In the personal Yeshua we can approach the Giver and in His Life, the Life of the Christos, we are given the Gift of God. The universal and oceanic Living Water rises up within us, and infuses our human life. Yeshua says again, “I am the true vine and my Father is the vine grower. Abide in me as I abide in you. I am the vine and you are the branches.” (John 15:1) We are one, one plant, one being in Christ. The teaching here, in this and in all the metaphors we use in Christianity about the mystical body of Christ, is that each one of us possesses the potential to be a unique expression of the Life of Christ.

The Nature of Our Surrender

The teachings of Yeshua are simple but hard, and that’s why He called it the "narrow path," because most avoid it. The ego-mind resists this level of trust, this level of kenotic self-emptying, this level of release from self-absorption and control. In many different kaleidoscopic ways, Yeshua keeps pointing to a central truth. He proclaims: "Follow me…Give up everything…..Become as a child.. " He invites us to become simple, naïve, trusting. "Love God with all of your being. Love your neighbor as yourself." In the Beatitudes Yeshua challenges us that in our letting go, in the diminutions of our ego-self and its layered attachments, we truly become free.

In His example and His teaching He invites us to become gentle and release from self-absorption. What He exhorts us to do is to follow Him, to let Him be the Master of our heart, and will, and help us relinquish from the bondage of the ego-mind. We are taught it is in our self-giving, in the relinquishment of the ego-mind, the consecration of our self to Christ, that we find ourselves and uncover our real freedom. Yeshua invites us to come to Him and release from our heavy burdens.

There are the trials of life of just surviving. However, the biggest portion of our burden is our own self-absorption and all the fear that arises. Yeshua says that uniting with Him is the way we lay our burden of separateness down. “Take my yoke (union) upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart.” He whispers to us that we will find rest, a rest that comes from letting go. “For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matt. 11:30) Yeshua gives us a warm and intimate invitation. At the same time there is a caution there, that yoke or union with Him is a also a discipline. It is a discipline to be accessible to God, to be given to Christ. That inner work of kenosis has to happen. To find this interior freedom an unburdening of self has to happen.

Spiritual Authority

An essential task to even begin on a spiritual path and to stay faithful is to acknowledge and accept there is an authority, a Reality, a Life that is higher than our own ego-mind. There is a Will to which our own private, personal will is accountable. There is a Love to which we bow and give endless adoration and trust. Without this we can go nowhere. Without adoration and trust our ego becomes a god unto itself, and we become entrapped in a life of hopeless idolatry and self-absorption. This consciousness of separateness and self-idolatry is the source of suffering and every evil in the world. The consciousness of self-absorption without limits and without submission and without accountability is what the modern consumer-prosperity-culture holds as an ideal. And it will bring only misery, evil, and suffering for all.

In the letters of Paul are frequent references to the teaching that Christ is Lord. We have to remember what a revolutionary statement that was in a time when only Caesar was deemed Lord. To embark on the consecrated transformed life we must continually choose a greater Life, a greater Love as sovereign over our life. For those who are on the Way of the Heart the Divine Beloved in the Person and Life of Christ must become the true Master. How do we let Christ be the Master in our daily practice? This is the important question we ask ourselves. His invitation is that we will find ultimate freedom, joy, and belonging in his yoke. And of course the other meaning of yoke is "joining" or "union." It is the yoke of self-relinquishment, the relinquishment of the ego-mind, and all its self pre-occupation, fear and grasping. The hand that offers in love cannot open when it is clenched.

Kenosis

St. Paul spoke of this Life of Christ within us as the "Great Kenosis."(Phil. 2:6) Kenosis is the hand that opens, releases, extends, and offers. In our praxis of the kenosis of Christ we learn to lay down our weapons of self-defense and separateness. We may recognize them as our frequent rationalization, our reactive criticism of others, our avoidance of seeing the truth of our self-absorbed thoughts and actions. In kenosis we find the freedom to dwell in the Heart of Christ and find our belonging. In kenosis we find we are free and at peace, to receive criticism, to receive disappointment, and even to receive failure. In the freedom of kenosis we are free lay down our life, especially the habitual patterns of our conditioning. We are free to relinquish the life long conditioning, mental formations, and habit patterns that feed our self-absorption, and prevent us from opening to the Unconditioned Life of Christ that is our true Life.

The Open Handed Life

In the beatitudes Yeshua invites us to cease from grasping, to live the freedom of the open handed life so that we can receive mercy, peace, and fullness of life. When the hand releases from everything, only Essence remains. And to open to Essence is to open to Christ and bring to our own life the reality Paul described in Galatians: "I live, not I, but Christ lives in me." Christ is the Master who invites us to "Lose your life, so that you can find your (real) life." (Matt. 10:39)

In our practice of Prayer of the Heart we continually ask, "How do I let go of grasping, how do I release from the compulsions of the ego-mind? " This release into the freedom of Christ begins with our "cultivation of attention," to see when we are grasping with the mind, insisting on our rights, our opinions, insisting that our agenda in life be the first and only priority? This means seeing the thought forms in our minds and seeing the ego-self attach to them. And in each moment of consecration we learn to release our humanity, our human thoughts, our human desires, and our human attachments, to the will of the Master. This consecrated attention becomes Presence and Adoration. Equally we bring our cultivation of intention to each moment of life. We release from all motivations but one, our heart's desire to be one with and to ceaselessly offer all that we are in love and self-gift to the Master, Yeshua, our Beloved.

Endless Conversion to the Master

The life of open-handed offering to Christ is a life of endless, ceaseless conversion. In this offering we find an interior act of willingness to see the injuries we may inflict on our own souls and on those nearby. This ceaseless conversion leads us to return to Christ the Master to say "You know that I love you, help me to follow you." To receive and accept our sorrow and let it be the means of continual conversion is our yoking and "oneing" with Christ.

In the Christian path of meditation or contemplative prayer, unlike some other traditions, the only real master, the only true guru, the only teacher, is Christ. This offers a tremendous safety to us. Tragic things happen in any religious tradition when persons surrender themselves in misplaced Faith to flawed human beings. Terrible injury can happen. Some persons are very skilled, trained, and holy teachers but no human being is without failing. When Christ is our sole master and sovereign over our hearts, master of the soul, when Christ is our singular teacher, when Christ is our only true guide, then we have the genuine safety to fully give ourselves in trust. Teachers in the Christian contemplative tradition can be companions on this road to Emmaus. They can encourage and point us back to the light of Christ in our own hearts. Christ alone is the Master. Together we know that the One we seek is the One who walks with us. And we may often only know his Presence in the burning of our hearts. It is enough. To give oneself ceaselessly and without reservation to Him is the joy of coming Home, to our singular Refuge, our singular Joy, our singular Trust.

Chapt. 1- Breathing Yeshua- Christian Meditation in the Way of the Heart

2011-05-20T19:01:00.000-07:00

Breathing Yeshua

Sr. Antoinette Traeger O.S.B. exclaimed with determination, "The only thing I could do was sit and breathe." Antoinette Traeger, a partner in Prayer of the Heart ministry and an 80 year old monastic spiritual elder, spoke a simple and deep wisdom in response to a challenging moment in her life. Sometimes in life we realize to sit and breathe, to be with the experiences of life with wholehearted presence and loving intention, is all we can do; and it is sufficient and complete. My wife, Jeanette, a Zen meditation practitioner, has a calligraphy on her wall "Sit and Breathe" to remind her in a similar way of her spiritual practice.

Our inner spiritual work turns on the tension of the mind's compulsion for control and the freedom of the heart's willingness to open and surrender in love. We can learn to breathe and both receive and give ourselves in love to the "I AM," Who is Love, Who offers Itself to us eternally. Our mind agendas always fall short and are filled with faulty assumptions. In every moment the one thing we can do is "sit and breathe." In contemplative Buddhism this has long been the mantra. In Christianity this "I AM" in life is revealed to us with fiercely personal intensity in the face of Jesus and oceanically in the universal Heart of Christ. In contemplative Christianity and the tradition of the Prayer of the Heart the one thing, the central thing, we can always do, is "sit and breathe Yeshua." To sit and breathe Jesus, or Yeshua, in the Aramaic, is to sit and inhale in receptive presence and adoration, and to exhale in the self-offering Agape that is Christ. To breathe Yeshua is to unite our life with His life in us, each moment of life. This is not an ideal to aspire to, but a practice to be actualized and lived.

In the Christian tradition this practice of uniting ourselves with the inner Life of Christ in prayer word and breath comes to us from the desert fathers and mothers of early Christianity. In his book on Christian Contemplation Brian Taylor speaks of this development in Christianity:

"However, at some point these desert contemplatives began to use the name

of Jesus as their invocation. In the fourth century text, The Life of

Anthony, by Athanasius of Alexandria, there was already a practice of

invoking Christ in a repetitive prayer, even linking the breath to its

repetition, as if the one who prayed was actually breathing Jesus: 'Anthony

called his two companions...and said to them, "Always breath Christ. ' " (Taylor, p.73)

We know this practice as the Prayer of the Heart. When Christianity was a vital movement and not yet an institution, the ancients of the early centuries fled the towns and cities of North Africa and the Middle East to realize the simplicity and singled hearted life of the Kingdom to which Yeshua invites us in the Gospel. The Good News proclaimed by Yeshua is that God is accessible to all, and our call in this life is to become wholly accessible to God. Hence there is something we must do to become single hearted; to live a life wholly consecrated to God.

From this desire for the singular, undivided life came the word "monos" and the creation of the monastic life. The early men and women monastics were intent on realizing a life consecrated to union in Christ. They lived as hermits and as cenobites, or in communities. They gathered around teachers or guides who were called "abba" or "amma", spiritual father or mother. The desert ammas and abbas sought to give their lives completely to prayer both in solitude and silence, and in activity, and to guide others to the same singular life of the Heart. Sr. Antoinette is a modern descendant of these followers of Christ, a true Amma of the desert tradition. Her simple wisdom is their wisdom too.

The term that the ancients used for this inner transforming work of union with Christ was "Purification of the Heart." They did not intend that the Heart or spiritual center was unclean, but rather that our life, our will and consciousness, needs to be undivided or purified in its orientation to the singular purpose of the Heart, communion with God in Christ. Therefore the goal is to be undivided, wholly committed, fully consecrated to Christ in all things.

Like all of us the ammas and abbas realized that the primary impediment to the undivided life is the divided attachments and culturally conditioned purposes of the mind. When they went into the desert seeking simplicity and commitment, they brought their mind and its incessant thoughts and traffic with them. Therefore to be fully given and to rest in communion with Christ in the Heart they realized they must find a freedom from the mind's tyranny. These seekers formulated a simple schema in their prayer life. They understood that a person thinks about God in the prayer of the mind; a person speaks to God with the prayer of the lips; and a person experiences God in the silence and interior communion of the prayer of the heart. To assist in this process of anchoring in the Heart or spiritual center they understood that using a prayer word in alignment with breath was most efficacious. They chose a word or phrase from the scriptures. And for many the most powerful word of all was the name of the Redeemer Christ, Jesus, or Yeshua. Over time for many in Eastern Christianity the form of the Prayer of the Heart most commonly known was the Jesus Prayer. An expanded form of the Jesus prayer ("Lord Jesus, Have Mercy.") was used by many based on the Gospel exclamation of Bartimaeus, the blind man. "Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me."(Mark 10:47) Various forms of the Jesus prayer have been used through the centuries, but the simplest and most easily aligned with the breath is the holy name of Jesus or Yeshua. Again Brian Taylor speaks of this ancient tradition of inner communion with Christ:

"This rich and focused tradition is perhaps the only specific, practical

teaching about contemplative prayer in all of Christendom that has been

handed down faithfully and precisely from master to disciple, remaining

intact over sixteen hundred years. In this sense, the Jesus Prayer/Prayer

of the Heart tradition is more akin to the way in which Buddhist or Hindu

meditation is handed down from generation to generation than it is to

anything comparable in the West.

The use of the Jesus Prayer and the teachings about contemplation that

surrounded it spread from master to disciple through the deserts of Egypt,

and then came into prominence in the sixth century at the well-known and

ancient monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai, established by Emperor

Justinian I in 527. In the fourteenth century the center of the Yeshua

Prayer movement moved to Mt. Athos, Greece.

…In our day, Mt. Athos and to a lesser degree, St. Catherine's

of Sinai, continue as centers of practice of the Jesus Prayer."

Prayer of the Heart was understood then and now to be the way we anchor our attention (awareness) and our intention (will), fully in the Heart of Christ. This practice takes place during formal times of prayer in silence and sitting. The Prayer of the Heart is also a practice that is ceaseless. It takes place throughout the day, in the midst of activity, with a habitual and ongoing return to the name of Yeshua in moment to moment presence and self-offering love, in all that we do, in our natural inhalation and exhalation of the breath. This way the invitation to a life of ceaseless prayer from Yeshua and the apostle Paul is seen as both possible and desirable for all. All who breathe can breathe Yeshua.

We have an expression of reassurance in our culture when a person is fearful; we say "Breathe easy." When we are in the middle of life, breath is a way that we re-orient to abiding in the present moment when our consciousness has been captivated by memories of a painful past or a dreaded imagined future. When we can root and ground in the present moment we can live where God lives, in the present eternal moment.

"In the seventh century, John Climacus advised: 'Let your calling to mind of Jesus be continually combined with your breathing and you will know the meaning of silence.' " (Taylor, p.73)

Indeed to breathe is to breathe Life, and a powerful word for God in the Jewish tradition is Ruach, or Life-Breath. To breathe fully with attention and intention is to participation in the flow of the Spirit God who is our true Life. This is our antidote to the mind's compulsion for control and fixation with past pain and future possibility. To breathe Ruach, or Life- Breath, is to breathe Yeshua, and to root and ground in what is real and true. Actualizing this Truth of the Christ Life is much beyond any relaxation technique.

When I breathe Yeshua, I participate in the Spirit of God with full attention and intention. Yeshua is the gift of God (He proclaimed to the Samaritan woman at the well). If we open to receive Him, He is given to us infinitely as gift, without expectation. And the Life of God becomes a spring of Living Water welling up within us. In my breath I bow ceaselessly in the attention of presence and adoration. In my breath I offer ceaselessly in love with hands extended, with the intention of being poured out in all that I am and all that I am given. To breathe Yeshua is to continually say "yes" to receive Him, and to say "yes" to our self-gift of Love in the offering to Him of our own life and humanity. I breathe in Yeshua; I breathe out Yeshua. I breathe in the gift of God's Life; I breathe out in offering the gift of my own life in God. In my breath I sink into and abide in communion in the Heart of Christ. In this inner communion with Christ I touch the Kingdom and the Kingdom touches me.

The Fire in the Cave of the Heart

2009-10-03T20:29:00.001-07:00

The Fire in the Cave of the Heart

In 1970 at age 21 I was lost in a cloud of despair, confusion, clinical and existential depression. Crowded by suicidal thoughts and the torment of my own mind I cried out for help. The help came in a remembrance, as the ancients of the Middle Eastern desert tradition would say, a “remembrance of God.” The experience began with a memory of being a small child, hiding in the tall grass behind my grandmother’s house (where we also lived). Seated on the ground, cross legged, with eyes closed my attention and intention were rooted in a shining Presence within, felt in the area of the anatomical heart. The Presence was alive, Life Itself, Luminous and enveloping. As was my pattern as a child, I stayed there for a while, immersed in that Presence. I thought of it as “the Friend,” and nothing unusual. In this remembrance at age 21, I remembered again the interior sanctuary of “the Friend” and went there, and the “Remembrance of God” became actualized in the present moment, and the hellish torments of the mind were lifted.

Heaven only knows why I, or any young child, “forgets” the Kingdom of God within. Yet expulsion from that interior Garden where we walk in the cool of the evening with the Beloved (Genesis) seems to be the human pattern of development. We become immersed in the world of socially constructed reality and form an egoic self to be our vehicle in this world, and we lose the memory of our Source and Origin immersed in forgetfulness until we may experience a spiritual awakening in adult life. But then, at age 21, I knew that this reawakening to the central truth of our existence was real and I could base my life on it. We “re-member” our divided life of separateness in this truth, or we lose it in the dissolution of forgetfulness.

It is good to encourage all those who nurture their longing for the “re-membering” of their Life in “the Friend.” The name often given for this interior sanctuary space of Divine Light and Presence across many traditions is the “cave of the heart.” This luminous Presence of Life itself in the ancient desert tradition of Christianity is the very Fire of the Spirit of Christ. This simple truth is the essence of the Christian mystical teaching. And our exploration of the mystical Coptic Gospel of Thomas is a focus on this simple truth, a truth too often ignored by the historical representations of Christianity that we know today as “churchianity.” In the canonical Gospel of Mathew Yeshua (Aramaic form of Jesus) says “ I have come that they might have Life, and have it fully.” (Matt. 10:10). He was referring to the transmission of his own Life and Essence as the purpose of his mission and teaching. His Life and Essence are the “Living Flame of Love” at the center of the heart or spiritual center, so poetically named by the mystic John of the Cross. And our purpose is to let our humanity be a vessel of this Light and Fire of Christ. As Abba Joseph, the ancient desert teacher and guide says, “Why not become all Fire!” (Apothegmata) This theological teaching of Theosis is the core teaching of Eastern Christianity and the summation of humanity’s life purpose. To become “Yeshua’s Fire” is our life’s purpose.

Since that day in 1970 I have grown in the “re-membering” of a divided life, and based my life’s journey in the simplicity and immediacy of the teaching of that experience. I have found support and accountability through my work with spiritual teachers, both in Zen and contemplative Christianity. In reclaiming my Christian roots I have come to understand that meaning of salvation is spiritual healing, a coming home to the Center. As the Christian mystic and teacher John Main says, “Meditation is coming home to our own center and realizing it is the gateway to the Center of all.”(The Heart of Creation )

On this path we realize that the gift and self-transmission of Yeshua is a divinized soul, and humanity, not a divinized institution. And we realize Yeshua’s truth that the real temple is the heart, and not the bricks and mortar building on the hill. It is the truth for which he was crucified by the religious and political authorities of his time. On that day in 1970 I learned that salvation is not a distant or historic event that happened in biblical times, nor at the end of time or biological life, it is a process of healing that is, and can be life-long in every moment of life through the soul’s accessibility to the Living Flame of Love within that extends outward into our humanity and all the world. I learned as Yeshua says “. On that day you will know that I am in my Father and you in me, and I in you.” (Jn. 14:20) That day can be every day, when we live out our life’s purpose.

The world was introduced to a stunning paradox in 1945 when the atomic bomb was first exploded and used as an instrument of mass death at Hiroshima, the same year The Gospel of Thomas was uncovered in a dirt bank close to limestone caves near the settlement of Nag Hamadi in Upper Egypt. In December of that year, two Egyptian brothers found several papyri in a large earthenware vessel while digging for fertilizer. The Nag Hamadi scriptures were a collection of ancient scriptures that was not included in the canon of the Bible. Archaeologists believe the scriptures were hidden by nearby monks of the monastic community of Khenoboskion, founded by St Pachomius, to keep them safe from destruction by warring religious factions. The Gospel of Thomas was one work of 53 parchments written in Sahidic Coptic, the last remaining language still close to the extinct ancient Egyptian pharaonic language. I often think Divine Providence works in its own ways and gives to the soul of humankind those needed wisdom resources when it is ready. The Spirit blows where She will.

A few years ago in a public forum I asked Marcus Borg, scholar and theologian (author of Meeting Jesus Again for the First time, The God We Never Knew, and The Heart of Christianity) the question: “Is authentic religious faith about believing the right things?” His answer was. “No, it’s about right relationship.” I have spent much of my 60 years consciously in love with the relational Living Flame of Love within that Yeshua the Christ offers us, yet chronically disappointed with those denominations and historic structures who claim to be his representative and repository of his teaching and presence on earth. The great tragedy of the Christian movement is that it has lost its way in collective “forgetfulness” investing its energies in external forms and structures, becoming yet another manifestation of those “principalities and powers” who rule this world. The radical teaching of Yeshua of the “Kingdom within” that the temple is in the deep heart, and not in bricks and mortar on the hill, has not been fully actualized in our world.

What is the nature of this “right relationship” that is the foundation of true religious faith? As Yeshua says in the canonical Gospel, “ I am the Vine, you are the branches.”(John 15:5) The ontological reality of our innate oneness with the Divine can however remain unrealized, unactualized. And that would explain the state of the human condition and its manifold brokenness. In the ancient mystic tradition of Eastern and Western Christianity, the image of God within, the Inner Light of the Divine at the center of our being, remains a hidden truth, until we actualize that Light in a growing inner communion with God and express it in our relational life with the other beings we walk with in this life. Hence our relational life with the Divine has both a vertical and a horizontal dimension of realization. The unrealized relationship with the Divine by the human soul is a study in existential failure, spiritual suffering, and even evil, when human consciousness implodes onto itself in a life of narcissistic self absorption, rather than God absorption, with all the resultant collective evils of violence, war, poverty, and exploitation.

Religious faith as relationship implies direct and conscious experience of the Divine, yet the religious denominations throughout time have emphasized the mediation of the Divine through scriptural interpretation of concepts or the institutional and priestly mediation of sacramental grace and ritual. This describes the historical struggle in Western Christianity between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, salvation alone through correct beliefs, or correct affiliation with the “divinized” institution, rather than interior union with the Divine Light within. Eastern Christianity, in contrast, has had a profound spiritual theology of transformative relationship with the Divine through unitive experience in the teaching of Theosis, or Divinization of the soul from within, but has relegated the ancient praxis of Prayer of Heart of inner communion with God to a few male monks on Mt. Athos or Mt. Sinai and beyond the reach of most ordinary humans.

The question presents itself to many sincere people of faith, why has Christianity as an historic movement failed to be a transformative agent in those historic communities who claim to be followers of Yeshua? Why the historic failures of religious wars, injustice, persecution, cruelty, and injustice? Why the negligence of the poor, complicity with colonial subjugation of entire peoples, complicity with mass exterminations of Jewish and indigenous peoples? Why has Christian faith failed to be a dynamic practice in modern secular societies? Why do so many contemporary Christians not experience an interior ongoing presence of God as a vital force in their lives? Today most Christians can tell you about their doctrinal and denominational affiliation and identity. They can tell you very little, if anything, about their daily practice of conscious interior communion with God.

In the space of my own lifetime (1948- present) humankind has embarked on a growth in technological knowledge and development at the service of military domination and commercial greed that has brought us to a point of a growing danger of extinction from a nuclear holocaust or environmental collapse of the life systems that support us. Prominent writers, philosophers, and spiritual teachers speak of a growing race between our capacity to grow in consciousness to guide the growth and use of new technologies that shape our earth and civilization, and our unconscious, destructive capacity to misuse these same creations to lead us to a path of destruction for our species and ecosystem.

The Gospel of Thomas stands in marked contrast to the Canonical Gospels. The Canonical Gospels were adopted as part of the official biblical Canon by the Council of Nicea that was called by the Roman Emperor Constantine in 325 A.D., who insisted that with the merging of the Christian religion with the Roman Empire there must be codified and standardized official scriptures and doctrines (Nicene Creed). At the time of the Council of Nicea there were a number of Gospel texts in circulation throughout the Mediterranean and the Middle East. From among these the Council of Nicea chose four, in addition to other books and letters to be included in the official scriptures of the nascent Roman Catholic Church. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of diverse sayings from Yeshua, the Christ. In contrast with the canonical Gospels there is no narrative. There is no beginning or end, no birth, death, or resurrection narrative. The Gospel of Thomas is above all a collection of mystical teachings. It addresses directly the question that the mystic seeks to answer, how to have conscious communion with ultimate Mystery, we call God, or whom Yeshua addressed personally as “Abba, or “papa,” and named more generally as “Allaha,” an Aramaic term as the Source of all being. The Gospel of Thomas is considered by many scholars to be an older text, and some believe it is the “Q” text, which has been a source for later texts, and possibly dates from 50 A.D. The Gospel of Thomas is organized into short sayings or “logions.” Many of these resemble the sayings of Yeshua in the canonical texts but clearly point towards a more mystical interiority.

In contrast the canonical Gospels, derived from the oral traditions of diverse Christian communities of the first century, have an emphasis on a narrative structure. Among the four books of the Gospel there are a number of mystical references, especially in the Gospel of John and the “I AM” statements made by Christ. However, the structure of each of these Gospels is a narrative encompassing the life of Christ and focusing on the three years of his active ministry. This is a critical point. A religion based on narrative is a religion based on a story. Without the mystical teaching at the core of religion, the task of the follower begins by believing the story, and culminates with an act of allegiance aligning oneself with the historic victor in the story. This is mythic religion, and it is what mostly passes for religion now and in times past. Essentially the believer makes the choice for membership on the winning team in the competition for dominance of history. The messiah or savior in this story is the one who comes solely at the end of time in a personal or collective parousia, not the one who comes each moment of life restoring the soul to oneness with the Divine in a lifetime of healing.

Now this understanding of the power of story is not surprising since the psychological school of social constructivism bases its theory on the idea that humans make meaning through story. We tell stories all the time to each other about where we come from and where we are going and what happens along the way. And we know through the psychotherapeutic school of narrative therapy that there are some stories that are liberating and some that are oppressive. Stories help with defining identity and tribal/group affiliation. A collectivized institutionalized religious story and our allegiance to it does not in itself provide us with an awakening to a unitive experience with the Divine and ongoing commitment to a transformation of the soul that is the rightful promise of the practice of authentic religious faith. Rather a rigidified and triumphalist identity is likely to lead to the pattern of colonial conquests, forced mass conversions, abuses of power, persecution of nonconformity, and religious wars that history has brought. Uniting the temporal power of the Roman Imperium, and the Catholic religious structures and ideology formalized at the Council of Nicea brought into being a social political order that would dominate the world for centuries, and an active persecution of any competing religious ideas or movements. Armed with the Augustinian ideology of original sin and salvation through the Church alone brought us a divinization of the institution in a manicheistic polarized view of human history rather than a divinization and healing of the soul from within leading to a more unified and healed world.

The Gospel of Thomas does not stand against the narrative Gospels. Rather it completes them. While the canonical Gospels present us a story rooted in time and history, the Coptic Gospel of Thomas is rooted in timelessness and the present moment. The Gospel of Thomas reveals the truth of the identity of Christ as the Living Flame of the Light and Fire of Divine Love at the center of the spirit, and reveals the mission of Christ as the One who kindles the Flame of His own essence in the soul human beings. ( “Yeshua said: I have cast fire upon the world, and now I tend it to a blaze.” Logion 10) We are invited to draw near and become ourselves this lit flame of Divine Light and Love. (“Yeshua said:Whoever is near to me is near to the Fire.” Logion 82) The Gospel of Thomas is called a gnostic text yet wrongly associated with gnostic dualistic mythology. What you see in the sayings of Yeshua in this work is the deconstruction of mythology and the invitation into living the experiential knowledge or “gnosis” or “nous”, or “da’ath” (Hebrew) of the ultimate mystery of the Living God. This is “Contemplation” defined by Gregory the Great as the unmediated knowledge of God infused by Love. Without the mystic teaching of Yeshua we are likely to have the result we have had historically, an institutional ‘churchianity” of diverse denominations rooted in historical conditions that no longer exist. A grounded mystic teaching can and will bear fruit in the development of a tradition of sustained spiritual praxis (practice) whose expressions are transmitted from teacher to student and from generation to generation, each growing from the learning of the spiritual elders of the preceding generation. It is a Fire that is kindled and tended in the Cave of the Heart.

In our world now and throughout time we have seen the results of human life without lived consecration, human life that is lived in forgetfulness and separation from the Divine Life within. The result of a life that is not holy, not consecrated, is desecration, of all that is good, holy, life-giving and healing. This has been the norm throughout time and history. We are at a juncture in history when this awakening to the immediacy and ever present Living Flame of Love within is necessary not only for our own individual salvation, but also for the preservation of the planet and for the web of life that sustains us all. The ancient mystic wisdom traditions of the world are reviving in our time, and that includes the ancient Christian wisdom tradition of Prayer of the Heart as a practice of inner communion with Christ in the sanctuary of the Heart, and with a theology of Theosis, the divinization of the soul of humankind. Christians must not only believe in the historical Jesus/Yeshua to find spiritual healing, they must come to experience the Christ, the Living Flame of Love at the Center of the Spirit. Christ Savior and Messiah of the Soul, here and now. To actualize and live this truth “Tending Yeshua’s Fire in the Cave of the Heart” must be the core, not the periphery, of Christian faith and practice.

You are the peace of all things calm
You are the place to hide from harm
You are the light that shines in dark
You are the heart's eternal spark
You are the door that's open wide
You are the guest who waits inside
You are the stranger at the door
You are the calling of the poor
You are my Lord and with me from ill
You are the light, the truth, the way
You are my Savior this very day.
(celtic prayer)

Theosis and the Center

2007-09-19T13:08:00.000-07:00

Theosis and the Center
by Bill Ryan

"Meditation is returning to the Center and there finding the gateway to the Center of All." John Main

We live in a time when humankind can no longer afford to misuse religion to seek power and domination over others. The voices that seek an apocalyptic clash of religious superiority and exclusive truth claims through military violence cannot prevail. Now, more than ever we must seek to understand the "sapientia perennis," the perennial wisdom that is at the source of all authentic religious inspiration and the common ground of awakening to Ultimate Mystery that the great sages and saints across time and traditions have pointed to. Militant fundamentalism in the 21st century, armed with nuclear weapons, presents a threat to human survival and the survival of all creation. As we speak at least one U.S. presidential candidate is advocating the nuclear destruction of Mecca and other Muslim religious sites as an appropriate strategy.

Those of us who name ourselves as followers of Christ must also remind ourselves that in the name of Christ, a thirty years war was fought in Europe, decimating the population and infrastructure of entire nations, with countless acts of barbarity and brutality done for the sake of exclusive truth claims. We must also remind ourselves of the forced conversions of millions of indigenous peoples who were enslaved or murdered in the name of the cross of Christ. In similar ways other world religions have their own stories of inflicting violence and domination, and subjugation of others for the sake of allegiance to a creed. And today terrible civil conflicts continue in the name of religion in Iraq, between Muslim and Muslim, in India, between Muslim and Hindu, in Sri Lanka and Thailand between Buddhist and Hindu and Muslim.

Who Owns God?
Who owns God or the Ultimate? By any name or definition? Authentic religious inspiration should never be about exclusive pronouncements of allegiance to a "winning team" or the claim to have exclusive ownership of Divinity or access to God. Yet throughout time and history wars and persecutions have been about these exclusive claims for purposes of power and dominance. And yet, the mystics and saints remind us, though rarely we listen, that the real spiritual question facing a person on the journey is who owns us? Are we surrendered consecrated beings? Are our lives offered ceaselessly to the love of the Divine in service and healing to God's Creation, or are our lives possessed by the demons of our own obsessions for power, security, and greed in a vain attempt to escape the truth of the powerlessness of our own fragile and transitory passage in this life?

As the Benedictine mystic and teacher of contemplation, John Main O.S.B. has said, the solution is for us all to "return to the Center" and there find the gateway to the Center of all. For those on the Christian path by returning to the Center we can find the center of our own Faith, the Heart of Christ, and the central teaching of the human journey, the journey of Theosis, of the call to become transformed in Christ. To find and realize Christ at the Center we must journey to the Center, the "Deep Heart" of our deepest inner being, the sanctuary of the Beloved, and innermost dwelling place of Christ within us. As Jesus has told us in his Gospel teachings, the really good news is this: God is accessible, forever offered, forever present in the Inner Kingdom, and that our true worship and sacred dwelling of Communion with Him is not the building of bricks and mortar on the hill but Love's sanctuary at the Center. Our primary impediment is the mind's obsessions and the behavioral compulsions that flow from them. Abiding in the Heart in Prayer of the Heart offers us this freedom from such enslavement. The book, Pathways to the Heart- Sufism and the Christian East is about the common ground of our liberation in the God Mystery in the Heart as taught in the Semitic mysticism of Eastern Christianity and mystical Islam.

The Center and The Transformation of Theosis
One of the great contributions that Thomas Keating has made to the modern world is to synthesize the ancient wisdom of contemplative prayer and present it in modern terms. Among the teaching devices I received from him that remains helpful is a simple diagram. The diagram is a circle with concentric circles within. The circle is a metaphoric representation of the human soul or consciousness. Between the concentric circles are layers of soul or consciousness. The first layer near the outer layer or surface of soul is labeled as "ordinary consciousness." By this Fr. Keating means this is the layer that most human beings spend most of our time and focus in. It is a relatively unawakened state, based on the competitive separateness that dominates most social interactions, infused by the conditioning of the culture in which we have been socialized to live. The next layer is called "spiritual consciousness." For some this may be fleeting, for others it may be expansive and well developed. It represents the degree that our orientation to life comes from the interior life of God in contrast to a life dominated by egoic separateness and the values of the culture. Another circle close to the center is called "true self." This is the "unconditioned life" of our true identity and being as child of God, animated by the Divine Indwelling, the Imago Dei or Image of God within us. This is the outer layer of the "deep heart" or Center that John Main references. And deepest of all, beyond our intentional reach but still beckoning to us, is the Center of the center, the "Divine Indwelling." This is the seat of Christ's Presence within us. As Merton says, "it is not at our disposal," (Le Pointe Vierge) but those of us who are on the journey of transformative prayer, ever seek to bring our soul to the "disposal" or access of the Beloved's Presence within us.

The process of prayer and transformative life in God is to bring the entirety of the soul to be accessible, to be a "lit flame" of this Divine Fire within, to be a lamp of the Divine Light within. Faithfulness in a lifetime of growing communion and surrendered self to the Source within is what makes "Theosis" or divinization of our humanity, possible. This "Light Within," as Thomas Kelly calls it, is the common ground of all true religious inspiration. Our mutual reverence of it, our realization of Divine Life in ourselves and our mutual adoration of the Beloved in all human beings, can be the basis of healing the great religious divides that so afflict and torment humankind. It can also be the basis of an appreciation of the diversity in the world that honors differences while not trying to make them disappear artificially.

So much blood has been spilled between the Abrahamic Faiths who have common ancestry, over who "owns" God, over who is "chosen" and over who has the rights to possession and dominance over the historical sites of Jerusalem. Such delusion and such hatred stand in resistance to the Great Mercy that enfolds us all. What we all have is the common inheritance as children of the Most High. What we all have is the common challenge to become surrendered to that Great Mystery we so love and adore rather than seek to own or possess a fictional exclusive right over that same Holy Mystery. The sanctuary of the Most High is within each of us, in the "Deep Heart. Jesus said we need just come close to it, "as a little child." Why should bricks and mortar and stones be our obsession? In summarizing this simple Wisdom I recall the words of the Coptic hermit, Abuna Matta al- Maskin who stated: "Jerusalem the Holy is right here, in and around these caves; for what else is my cave except where my Savior Christ was born; what else is my cave but the place where my Savior Christ was take to rest, what else is my cave but the place where He most gloriously rose again from the dead. Jerusalem is here, right here and all the spiritual riches of the Holy City are found in this 'wadi.' (cell)." (Kallistos Ware, The Inner Kingdom, p.92) The cave of the heart, the interior communion with Christ we open to in our daily practice of Prayer of the Heart, is the path to peace within us and peace between us.

Delving Deeply into the Jesus Prayer

2007-06-01T22:26:00.001-07:00

Theophan the Recluse says:
"Delve deeply into the Jesus Prayer." Martin Laird speaks in his book Into the Silent Land of the use of the Prayer word as a doorway into the communion realm of Christ in every day life as well as formal silence. He advises us not to think of this as magic or as something mechanical, and he is right. I have written in my book, Breathing Yeshua, in the opening of the first chapter, " Our inner spiritual work turns on the tension of the mind's compulsion for control and the freedom of the heart's willingness to open and surrender in love. " This interior opening then, of the heart, the center of our being, to surrender to and in Christ's Love is this doorway. The Jesus Prayer, as we delve the depths of it, leads us not into magical thinking, but into the very Heart of Christ, who is mercy. What arises in the mind as we try to approach this limitless Mercy that we know as the Christ experience, are all our resistances to surrender, to releasing from the mind's compulsions for control. If we think about our "mental obsessions" sometimes called demons in the desert tradition, they are all about the compulsion for control in some form or other. And we live in a universe where we have no control ultimately over external things, we only have the choice to give ourselves in love to God in life, and in each moment. What allows us to make this surrender is trust in the Realm of Mercy that we know as Christ. And the root word for Faith, Fidare, or Fides (Latin), is trust or to trust in, to be entrusted to. We leap then, in this praxis of Faith. We leap in longing for our true heart's desire. The Heart knows what we frequently do not know, in our souls too often dominated by culture and the ego-mind, that our heart's desire is Christ, our Beginning and our End, our Life's completion, our true Beloved. Our Heart knows that the false refuges of the mind offer no true solace or home, no strategy for control, and that there is only one true Refuge, to Abide in Yeshua's Love, as he has invited.

These are words of love, but what do they have to do with everyday, every moment existence, our practice of the prayer word? The prayer word, and most especially when our prayer word is the name of the Beloved of our Heart, is the homing pigeon, the anchor in what is real and true. It is the reminder of our continual bowing to our Beloved and the offering of our soul, our life, and all human existence as we know it, all of Creation's suffering to the Realm of Mercy. This is the only medicine for the healing of our obsessions for control. It is an every-moment practice.

I have a clear recollection pointing to this Realm of Mercy, coming to me from my earliest days in school. I grew up much of the time attending Roman Catholic parochial schools in a pre-Vatican II era. This was an expectation of all dutiful Catholic parents of that time, even for a single parent mother, as was my mother. I remember one of the prayer gestures given to me by nuns who taught me was this: -"When you are in distress, or when you hear of another soul in distress, when you hear an ambulance pass by, when you find yourself disappointed in life, when you find yourself discouraged, no matter what is happening to you or to another, when you think of the tragic things happening to people in the world, think of Jesus and "offer up" whatever it is, to that greater Mercy that is Him, because it matters, for oneself and for all."

Now at the time I don't pretend to have understood what precisely all that meant, but intuitively it seemed "right". It fit. No doubt there were some nuns, or some students who incorporated that practice as a form of magical thinking. But I did not pretend, even then, that my prayerful practice would necessarily change events or remove suffering from the world. Yet, it always gave me somewhere to go, and it fed the trust in the Greater Life, the Greater Mercy, the Greater Healing that encompasses us all. It was a true practice of Faith, then as a first, second, or third grader, and it is today.

Therefore it is important for us to look upon our practice of the prayer word in this way. It is a meeting of a contemplative prayer of union and a contemplative prayer of mercy (what we call intercessory prayer), for ourselves and for all God's creatures, all beings who inhabit our universe. When we truly let go of the mind's compulsion for control, and bow and offer our life and existence and everything in it, in love and givenness, in self-surrender and self-relinquishment, we become accessible to the God of Infinite Mercy who is total Self-Gift in Christ to us. There are practical teachings to be learned, yet this is not a mental technique. It is our lifetime of home-coming, and our Prayer Word is our calling out in love to the One who is our Home, as love beacon, and it will last until we draw our last breath and open to a finality of healing in the welcoming arms of the Divine Beloved who is the Source and Goal of our prayer. What was taught to me as a first grader has not changed. What I can do always is "offer it up." The "It" I am offering, I have learned, is everything in life. And I have come to know that there is a Greater who Offers and Receives in me. Our souls are the medium of this Eucharistic banquet of Life of God's Gift of Self to us and our self-giving to God. We are the consecrated bread and wine, lifted up in Christ, each moment of life and given, joined in the eternal wedding banquet and with the Bridegroom.

To me this what it means to delve deeply into the Jesus Prayer, or the true meaning of our prayer word.

Peace and Blessings to all,

Bill Ryan

Yeshua- Our True Conscience

2007-03-26T13:50:00.000-07:00

Yeshua- Our True Conscience
By Bill Ryan

"The Kingdom of God is very near; change the direction in which you seek for happiness." Yeshua of Nazareth

Nightly Examination of Conscience-
The foundation of a truly moral life is a life given to growth in love, love of God and all Creation, as stated in the great commandment of Jesus. The purpose of conforming our life to God's Life within us, is not to create a perfected "self" that is worthy of a reward at the end of life. Rather it is to become a clear vessel of God's healing love in the world.

Before we retire at the end of the day, it is good to examine the residue of where we have been in our consciousness, choices, and behavior. Our conscience is the word we have for listening deeply in the Heart for the heartbeat of the Beloved and harmonizing our life and consciousness with the One Life, the I AM Life that is the Heart of Christ. Our failures and missteps, the acts and intentions that are disharmonious with the Heart of Christ leave an unquiet residue. By examining this residue each day, we learn from our suffering and lack of peace. An important measure of living the surrendered consecrated life was given to us by Yeshua in the teaching of the beatitudes. Those who are blessed and happy in the spirit are those who walk the path of giving their life over to seeking and finding refuge in what gives true blessing and happiness and the relinquishment what doesn't. The surrendered life is the life that is love-offering. Let us then focus on Yeshua's teachings as the means of finding our true refuge.

Our decisions regarding our thoughts, words, and deeds, in what we do, in what we fail to do, or avoid doing, are the pivot-point of our spiritual life. If prayer is the turning of the will towards God, then all of life is prayer. Most especially the process by which we decide what we shall do is prayer and points toward the fruits of our inner life of God, or lack of it. The fullness of spiritual practice happens when deep Contemplation meets the conditions of life in the present moment.

The Great Commandment
In the Christian tradition the great commandment of love cited by Jesus from the Jewish Torah is the basis of all moral discernment.
“ 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)

Here Jesus tells us the basis of the spiritual life is also the basis of our moral life. Relational life, of which the essence is self-offering love, is the ground on which we base all decision making and discernment in our daily life and prayer practice. He tells us that the way into this kind of life is one of continual conversion, a letting go of those misdirections and attachments of the mind that have taken the place of right relationship in love. This includes and begins with the activity of the mind where misdirection or sin happens. Jesus also tells us here in the Shema' that the vertical and the horizontal relationship are not separate. God is the one Self that we love, and that loves in us, both alone in solitude and in all the relationships of our human life. What gives injury or neglect to either affects the entire matrix of our relational life in God. Christ is the living spring in our Heart; Christ is the living presence in those beings we encounter in our lives. The symbol of the cross in a circle so often found in the Celtic tradition symbolizes the totality of the vertical and horizontal relationship of the communion paradigm of Christ.

Every-Moment Practice of Conscience
We have a daily practice of silent communion with Christ at intervals in the day. As we orient the soul toward this communion as ongoing choice we become increasingly aware of what opposes or injures this state of communion. Those thoughts, those words and deeds that are unloving, injurious, exploitive or cruel either in intention or effect become increasingly disturbing to our interior life in God. The more we practice the more attuned we become to those disturbances. At the end of the day the residue of that disturbance is likely to be accessible and noticed by us, a disturbance to interior peace. That is why our evening practice is a good time to review the day in a daily examination of conscience. We can note where we have caused injury and where we have neglected to love and serve as our heart's desire calls us.

Becoming Accessible and Open to Receive the Gift
There is no room for the guilt of judgment of our worthiness as a person. All life is sheer gift of God and our task is to become accessible to God, not to prove our worthiness. (Does the branch prove its worthiness to the vine? No, it only opens to receive the Life of the Vine.) That error only feeds the fiction of a perfected ego and creates a block in our complete acceptance and responsibility for what we have done or what we have failed to do, and to fully direct our energies toward contrition and conversion. Acceptance means accepting the natural sadness when injury is done to love. Those injuries can come in many ways, lies, betrayals, harshness, pridefulness and self deception, taking what isn't freely given, hurtful anger, abuse, a lack of reverence for personhood, and the lack of compassion for the needs of other beings.

True Contrition Arises Each Moment
True contrition comes from the understanding that life arises fresh each moment, and contrition allows us to drop the burden of the distant past, or even the previous moment and return to our heart's desire to be given to love. This is the freedom of conversion, and the wisdom that real repentance is re-directing our life towards true happiness, what we most want and desire. This is true metanoia, coming home, again and again and again, ceaselessly. We are all prodigal children, having dissipated and wasted the gift of our life essence, again and again. Yet the door is always open and the arms always welcoming us, a million times in the course of a day or a lifetime. The important thing is to return home to the Heart, and learn compassion from the pain inflicted on ourselves and others. The true wound is separateness, which heals as we harmonize the soul with unitive life of God within. We are not asked to create a separate and perfected worthy self. We are invited to come home and receive the gift of our belonging as true child of God. We will never create this perfected self, even if we try. We can always return to faithfulness, and return Home to God who is our Home, in this moment, in this breath.

Evening Reflection and Review
By examining the circumstance of the thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions we have made, we can learn from them and bring the fullness of our practice into that situation when it arises again, as it will in various forms. Our practice is always to observe the mind and to abide in the heart. When we are able to "see," to witness the arising of misdirected hidden thoughts and motivations, we can truly offer them up, and relinquish them to make space for our most essential desire, which is loving kindness or agape. The desert elders saw that true conversion must involve a praxis of freedom from addictive or destructive thinking patterns. Over time we cultivate Heart Presence as a ceaseless expression of Prayer of the Heart in daily life and activity, making each moment of life prayer.

Reflection on the Beatitudes- Yeshua's Guide to Self-Offering Love

1. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
I shall not seek solace in creating, promoting, and defending images of self. My personality, my social persona, and most importantly the ego-self are not who I am, but creations of the mind. I will seek not to defend or promote what is not true. I shall hold lightly any mask I wear in this life, necessary as it might be at times. I shall be ready to lay it down. In my true spirit is essence of being, the freedom of nakedness. In my true spirit I can be utterly at peace to be who I am in Christ, and shall always be, simply child of God, child of the Universe. It is enough that I am loved into being. I need not justify, deserve, or aggrandize my existence. I especially shall not seek to be something more than another or that I truly am, especially to compete or belittle, to dominate or divide. "In this nakedness of spirit the soul finds its rest." (John of the Cross- Prologue- Ascent of Mt. Carmel) Help me to rest always in Your Heart alone in my heart.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
All of this passing life is impermanent. I shall not seek to hold on and hold fast to what is temporary and passing. Shall I insist that conditions, persons, and things remain fixed in my clenched fist so that I can have the deception of security? What I hold in my grasp, as dear and cherished as it may be, those people, relationships, roles, and conditions I love and desire, I shall offer and release when it is time. I shall accept the pain of grief and accept that it shall pass. In the continual release I shall seek and find the freedom to find my true Home and refuge, ceaselessly. And I shall deepen my trust that being Home in God is always enough, always sufficient. Help me to let go always into You.

Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.
I must remind myself that real strength and empowerment belongs in the commitment to act and live from the life of inner communion. The Communion Life is gentle and does not seek power over others. I shall not seek domination but healing and well-being for all. In this gentleness I shall seek real empowerment over my own self, my own humanity, my own gifts, and my own energies, my own behavior, the only power there is. I shall lay down any inclination toward retaliation or retribution for perceived injuries, and take pause, rest what in what is deepest, truest, and kindest for all, before I act. "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am meek and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. (Matt. 11:28) Help me to find my true security in your gentle Heart.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for uprightness.
Julian of Norwich has told us that we suffer spiritually because we rest where there is no rest. Indeed I hunger, I thirst to be one with you, to harmonize my soul with Your Heart in all that I do, in all that I wish for, in all that my soul becomes in this life. Let me seek only You and the action of your love and mercy in this life, and in the community of other beings. Let me always be disturbed by the disharmony and the disconnection and return to the life of Communion with You. I am happy when the One desire of my life is my only desire. It is Your desire, it is the same. As Marguerite Porete has said, "What you desire, Beloved, we desire. Tell me your desire nakedly.." This is uprightness. Help me to stand naked and unafraid, always before you, upright in the truth of my life, resting in the One Desire that is ours.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Too often my sense of justice and judgement towards others is a justification for exercising control and power. Too often I wish to retaliate for perceived hurts. I must learn to commit to the Mercy of Christ my outrage at the violence and injustice in the world. I must be willing to stand for mercy for all, especially those I don't like or don't agree with. I must be willing to stand in mercy for those who are powerless, beginning with my own powerlessness. Can I trust in Your mercy, that it is real and it is offered? Can I call on Yeshua's mercy each moment, and commit my need for healing and the healing of the world to Him as my every moment prayer offering. There is too much of "me" when what is needed is Yeshua's mercy. It is Home, and it is enough. Help me to find courage and heal my fear in Your mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
I am too often a house divided. Beloved, give me an undivided soul, a committed soul, a consecrated presence, a wholly surrendered will. Let my fist open to become only offering hands. Let there be no half measures, no avoidance of laying bare and laying down this life. Let my avoidance and my fear be opened to your touch, seen by your gaze, and receive the light and Fire of your given Life. Let my discipline be aflame with love alone, and not shaken. When I lapse, let me see it, and return home to my true desire. Let me not offer my soul to shallow substitutes or excuses, and to see them for what they are. Let there only be one Refuge in this life for me, in your Heart alone. Help me to know my lapses and find my way Home in You.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.
What is the state of your Shalom? It is to always be in harmony with You, to be oned with Your Life in my life. This is the well of health. May I always be vigilant and watchful with my anger, and my righteous thoughts, with my frustration with obstacles, with my fear of powerlessness. I possess nothing and my seeking any other thing than to be what I am destroys peace. It is enough to be in You alone, your own offspring, a ray of Your Light, a lit flame of Yeshua's Fire. There is nothing to be at war with, no conflict to provoke, no enemy to vanquish, only my own humanity to tame and bring to be at peace in You. Here is my only peace. Help me invite your healing to those wounds of conflict this day I have inflicted or received and find Peace.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of God.
I know it is human to desire approval, to be hurt by rejection, to fear retaliation and judgement from others, to stand alone when it is right and good and loving. Yet where is my freedom to be found? Too often I have denied the freedom of spirit, my true Home in You, my true belonging. Too often I have doubted in the truth of Your unceasing Love out of fear. You alone know me, You alone are my heart's desire. You alone are my true rest and belonging. Help me to accept and live the truth of Your freedom, and bring my fears and the wounds of my human existence to You, "Yeshua, the Christ, my love, my encircler, each day, each night, each light, each dark. Be near me, uphold me, my treasure, my Truth."

Christ as a light, illumine and guide me
Christ as a shield overshadow me
Christ under me
Christ over me
Christ beside me
On my left and my right
This day be within and without me
Lowly and meek, yet all powerful
Be in the heart of each to whom I speak
And the mouth of each who speaks unto me
This day be within and without me
Lowly and meek, yet all powerful
Christ as a light
Christ as a shield
Christ beside me
On my left and on my right.

***********************************************************************

Unified Life- Disciplined Life

2007-02-25T12:05:00.000-08:00

Unified Life- Disciplined Life

By Bill Ryan

Change and Motivations
This past year motivated by health concerns and a desire for more energy and zest in my life, I resolved to embark on a program of increased fitness and substantial weight loss. Late stage diabetes runs in my family and I knew I was at risk if I continued to maintain or increase the weight I had. I have been healthy in the past and slimmer. I had been a distance runner on a daily basis, running in the occasional road race, including marathons (26.2 miles) until 1998 when I developed an injury. With a low thyroid condition and continuing to eat as if I were a runner, I gained weight to the point where I weighed 230 lbs. as recently as last March. With it problems of higher cholesterol, borderline high blood pressure, and occasional back problems began to plague me.

A past formula for conditioning involved running an hour every day. I resolved to make a serious attempt to make that a discipline in my life, combining it with a serious dietary change, I made a goal of returning to my high school weight of 180 lbs. After strengthening my legs with weight training I began with five minutes a day of very slow jogging on a treadmill. The treadmill is much easier on the knees and allows me to monitor my running style and speed and not have to contend with weather conditions. Each week I increased the time and distance by five minutes. I ran this each day of the week except for one shorter day. It was difficult and trying in maintaining the will and stamina to do this each day. In addition I found that a vigilant awareness and detachment of thoughts of eating or returning to previous patterns, or thoughts of giving up the daily discipline were essential.

Discipline is Commitment
Such a change involves an unraveling of previous habits, their associated thought patterns and the habit energy that sustains them. It was a great exercise in the necessity of discipline and faithfulness in any transformative process. In roughly five months time I lost 55 lbs. and settled into a daily pattern, initially of 65 min. or 7.5 miles a day running. I reduced that because of joint pain to 55 min. or 6.2 miles day (10 kilometers). I have come to a plateau of 175 lbs. Borderline issues of high cholesterol and blood pressure are resolved. I am taking a reduced dosage of thyroid medicine. My daily diet has changed significantly around a much healthier intake of protein, vegetables, and grains.Looking back I see how essential the moment to moment discipline is. At the same time I see how the motivations in life are powerful if we organize our will around them. When we learn to love our children, our spouses, our friends, we learn to orient, to commit ourselves to those purposes above the impulse or habit energy of the moment. At the same time I recognize how lacking I am in applying the same level of discipline to unify my life around the central motivation in life, the desire for oneness with God. By some measures the time I spend in formal practice is certainly high, yet the discipline is certainly not commensurate with the profundity of the Desire. Since we know that this singular desire is not of our creation, but it is the Beloved's desire for us, and it is limitless and enduring. Discipline is commitment. Why not be given to this discipline more profoundly in a discipline beyond the discipline I have given for the sake of health alone!

Lenten Spirituality
The discipline of giveness to the love of God, of ceaseless abiding and refuge in the Heart of Christ, this is the consecrated life. It is our heart's desire. Rather than the drama of self punitive measures of sackcloth and ashes, the spirituality of the season of Lent is a call to discipline, a call to the commitment of Love, a call to confront and transform the habit energies that hold our lives in constraint and bondage. In this way our life can be freely given, freely offered, an every moment love-offering to the One who offers Divine Life each moment, whose very nature is Self-Gift. The kenosis of Christ is not only our model, but it is Christ within us that makes this self-emptying, self-giving to the Source, the Father, the central dynamic of our human life. This circular self-offering manifested and present in the activity of the Spirit is the mystery of human existence and its participation in Trinitarian Life.

The Discipline of the Daily Rule of Life
" Tighten to nothing the circle that is the world's things. Then the naked Circle can grow wide, enlarging, embracing all." Hadewich of Antwerp

Students who come to me to learn Prayer of the Heart often begin with the question, "How an I fit the formal silent sitting time into my present life?" As they progress the question changes, "How can I make all of my life into ceaseless prayer?" This quote above from Hadewich addresses this dynamic in our life. The consecrated given life excludes nothing, it is all within the "naked circle" that is God. The goal of the spiritual life is not to accomplish anything, to attain to anything or any state, but to offer everything that we are and that we encounter to the infinite love and mercy of God. This is the consecrated life. The essential requirement of this transformation is commitment in the form of discipline and faithfulness. Just like the gradual incremental quality of my running program, our willingness to open and stretch and grow in Christ, each moment and each day. Like the hands outstretched, we may begin with a clenched fist. But gradually the clinging fingers unfurl and we find a loosening in trust, an emptying and freedom from the bondage of our habit energy of thinking, feeling, and acting, a relinquishment of our compulsions, our addictions and all that support them. Then we become the chalice of our Lord's Life received, consecrated, and poured out in love.

Our daily discipline must be incarnate. It must have form to be real. It is our covenant with the Beloved. Here are some elements of the Daily Rule of Life, reprinted from The Beloved is My Refuge:

Cultivation in the Garden of the Beloved-
As spiritual beings, humans may be compared to plants. The secret garden of our life in the Beloved needs to be watered and nurtured; it must be directed with supports, like a climbing tomato or bean plant needs a trellis or pole. Air and light and fertile ground are needed. A rule of life is a way of bringing together all those elements that will consecrate, nourish, protect, and sustain our life in God.

Elements of a Rule of Life:
The elements of a Rule of Life are the means of cultivating and expressing the garden of this relationship of communion with God.

Consecrated Silent Communion- To cultivate this communion we need established, consecrated times of the day which we set aside for the central relationship in our life, from which all relationships spring. The nature of that time of silent communion in formal sitting practice should be restful and restoring, but also giving. The essential need of those consecrated times is faithfulness. This is the watering of the garden.

Consecrated Reading and Reflection- We need to also give time to reading and reflecting about the God who is our heart’s desire. We should make of this a Holy Leisure, which is restoring and enriching. This is the fertilizing of the garden.

Consecrated Contrition and Conversion- Contrition and Conversion are ceaseless practice. Therefore it is essential to set times of gazing in the mirror of self-reflection each day. We do this not to judge or condemn or deem any part of our humanity unworthy. Rather we do this so that we be willing to look honestly and nakedly at all those elements in our life, in our actions, in our ethics, in our inner and outer life, which are not in harmony with interior communion with God. We look closely for those aspects of our daily life which lead us from our deepest intention of love, or worse, bring injury to this intimacy with God. This daily practice brings the freedom of contrition and release from all that impedes the love of God in our life. The grace of conversion is always being offered. We can only make ourselves accessible to it. This is the weeding and the tilling of the soil of our garden.

Consecrated Service/Work- The praxis of self-giving Love extends to all of our community, to all beings, to all Creation, -to love and serve God in the world around us. Each of us will do this uniquely with our own gifts. Without making vows of service of some kind, our Covenant of Communion with God is incomplete and defies the purpose of Prayer of the Heart, which is to bring forth the God-life of Agape into the world. This is true whether our service is peeling potatoes, weeding the garden, ministering to the sick or cleaning up the polluted waterways in our community. This service is the praxis of Ceaseless Prayer and the growing of the fruit of the garden.

Community Prayer and Liturgical Practice- This may be more readily attainable for some than others. We may need to be creative and flexible in finding our community of practice, whether local or long distance. We include the community of those who walk with us on the Prayer of the Heart path and the wisdom of those who have walked before. We are in the stream of God's Love with other followers of the Way of the Heart in the eternal Present. This is the flowering of the plants of the garden, outward expression of the life of Inner Communion.

Accountability- Vows of Practice- It is good to share our Rule of Life with at least one trusted soul friend or spiritual mentor. It is good to ask that person to pray for you, to help you to be faithful to your covenant and with whom you can discuss your covenant from time to time. This is the sharing of our garden with our soul friend, or Anam Cara.

Our "Rule of Life" or " Personal Covenant with God" are vows of practice. Our Vows of Practice are akin to marriage vows. They are serious commitments. At the same time we must cultivate the humility to accept that we will fail in our faithfulness at times. Yet we must not give into discouragement, but as in a marriage, return to our practice, our singular desire to give ourselves to Love. This singular desire is our life and the core of our vows of practice.

The Simplicity of this Great Interior Work-
Despite the value of having a formalized commitment to the "whole cloth" of daily practice and the disciplines that sustain it, we should never lose sight of the utter simplicity of this practice. Everything we do in our life, in our Prayer of the Heart practice is at the service of this one central desire, this singular intention which Jesus proclaimed in the Great Commandment. All disciplines and practices are at the service of this great work to which all humanity is called. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing states it beautifully in this way:
"For I tell you this, one loving blind desire for God alone is more valuable in itself, more pleasing to God and to the saints, more beneficial to your own growth, and more helpful to your friends, both living and dead, than anything else you can do." (Johnston, p. 60)

May your Lenten journey be one of new life transformed by Love,
Bill Ryan

The Prince of Peace is Born Within Us

2006-12-12T11:36:00.000-08:00

Yeshua- Our Prince of Peace
by Bill Ryan

Inner Peace
When I was growing up I loved to read Pogo, the cartoon creation of Walter Kelley, in paperback book form. One of those quotes I remember most readily from one of the Pogo characters who are on a crusade to make the world better: " We will force peace and love down their dirty rotten throats." It illustrates well how we think of peace as an external ideal that we try to impose from the outside. We can contrast this with the invitation of Jesus,
" Peace be with you. My peace I give to you; not as the world gives." (John 14:27) I suspect

Pogo's character might have been trying to do the world's peace instead. When I was growing up I was also taught a simple prayer that said, "let there be peace and let it begin with me." That prayer taught a simple wisdom, that I understood intuitively, but the adults in my life didn't teach me how to live and abide in that peace within. The biblical tradition teaches us the word, Shalom; - the state of peace as the well being that arises from the soul being in inner harmony with God. When I was twenty one, in a moment of crisis, I cried out for help, and the help came in the form of a memory of myself as a child of age three. In the memory I would go to my favorite hiding place and close my eyes and leave behind my thoughts, and sink into a deep and secret place inside, and there be surrounded by a peaceful Presence. That was the beginning of my adult spiritual journey.

The Center
One of my teachers along the way, the Benedictine monk, John Main, spoke of this secret place inside, "Returning to the Center within us, is the gateway to the Center of All."

So this inner peace is a state, it is a state of communion with our Divine Beloved, an original state, a state of being Home, in the locus of our belonging. This is the state that Jesus invites us to, the peace that wordly human culture cannot give us.

In the Middle Eastern Abrahamic Faiths this practice of going to the secret Center is called the Remembrance of God. An un-Forgetting, an uncovering and abiding in what is Real and Ultimate. The meaning of the word- Re-membering, is a making One, making whole.

Healing the Soul of Humankind
The healing of the soul of humankind begins and ends within us. It is a life-long process which the mystic Julian of Norwich called our "oneing" with God, "the sweet and secret work of the Holy Spirit." Julian says that all human ills spring from the fact that we seek rest where there is no rest, and that only God within us can give us rest. Jesus invites us to this rest and healing at the sanctuary of His Presence within us, "Come to me you who are heavy burdened, and I will give you a place to rest your soul." Matt. 11:28
"Abide in my love." Thomas Kelly, the Quaker mystic calls this Center, "the Inner Sanctuary," citing Meister Eckhart he says: ." Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continually return."

Communion vs. Domination Paradigm
When we turn toward the Divine Center within we enter the Kingdom, or the Realm of Communion, where all are connected all are in relationship. Jesus says it this poetically beautiful way. "On that day you will know, that I am in my Father, my Father is in me, and I in you, and you in me." (John 14:20) There can be no greater connection, no greater communion than this. The Communion relationship, abiding in one another, sharing One Life, One Being. In the Center we come home to the Communion Paradigm, we come home to the life of Unitive Whole, where we all belong to the Essential Unity from whom all things arise and all things return. In the root names of the Divine in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions this Source and Essential Unity is called "Ela', Allaha, Allah."

The realm of societal culture is instead the realm of separation, where all are disconnected. The result is living the life of the Domination paradigm. All are separate, all are over and against one another, with the result of human life ruled by greed, wars, hatred fueled by differences of ethnicity, religion, and geography. The good news of the deep Wisdom traditions throughout the world is that we can learn to live life from the unitive state, life from the center that takes us into the Center of all. Instead of defending our little egoic, tribal, religious, and ethnic circles we can live and love from the One Circle that is within and encompasses us all.

Unitive Life
The Voice from the burning bush was the "I AM" Life. The voice that spoke in Jesus "Before Abraham, I AM", is the "I AM" Life. At the Center there is no Subject and Object, all is Subject. All is held within the " I AM" life. This is the true body of Christ for whom Paul said there is no distinction. There is no gender, religion, or ethnos. There is just the "I AM" the pure being of the Divine Beloved who holds all in the realm of Communion. This is where we find our True Life, and the True Life of all beings.

One of my teachers, Thomas Hand, who taught both Zen and Christian Contemplation said, "The God experience is Oneness, and fully accepting and living the Consequences." Our inner peace is the ceaseless abiding in the Communion Realm, within and without. and our release from captivity in the Domination Paradigm.

At the center of us is true peace. The peace that Jesus gives us, is the peace of inner communion with his Being within us. Nothing can destroy it, nothing can take it away, no fear or cruelty, or violence can stand against it. It is our home, our belonging, our security, our sanctuary, our true Life, and we can learn to live our life there. In that way we become peace, and share it with all we meet in this life.

Listening and Abiding
Not everyone will be drawn to meditation or Prayer of the Heart. But all of us can learn to listen deeply. When we do, we listen to the Heartbeat of the Universe in our own Center. The psalmist says, "Be still and know that I am God." "Deep calls on Deep." We cannot stop our minds from thinking but we can sink deeper than our minds into the spaciousness of the Center, and there listen. And cultivate that orientation like a homing pigeon, to bring us back home, again and again. When we enter into that inner quiet and listen we are accessible to the God experience, we are accessible to the Communion Realm.

When we are with another, and we release from compulsion to insist that another understand and agree with what we say, and instead listen from the heart-center, then we enter the common ground of unitive love, the communion realm, and listen to understand. From that perspective peace between persons and reconciliation can happen, with or without agreement of ideas. In deep listening we are in the God experience, listening to the " I AM" who encompasses all, the common ground of the Being of all beings.

Jesus invites us to "Abide in My Love". When we make a lifetime of learning to abide in the Ultimate we are following the "little way" of Lawrence of the Resurrection, the "little way" of our Buddhist Brother, Thich Nhat Hanh, the "little way" of the Quaker Mystic Thomas Kelly.
I have a favorite prayer chant that I practice alone or in groups it goes like this:
Listen, listen, wait in silence listening, for the One from whom all Mercy Comes.

One of my favorite mentors on the journey has been the monk and writer Thomas Merton who incorporated the passion for peace and justice with the interior silence of contemplation: He reports having an extraordinary experience of "Oneness" on the
corner of 4th and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky. (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander)

"Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire, nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way, all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other…..At the center of our being… is the pure glory of God in us. .. It is 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."

The Best Place to Pray
In the year 2000 while on retreat at a monastery in the mountains of Colorado I met a monk, named Theophane. He has since died. But he wrote a wonderful book called Tales of a Magic Monastery. He has said the stories are all true, not literally but metaphorically. The Best Place to Pray- (from Theophane the Monk)"I asked an old monk, "How do I get over the habit of judging people?" He answered, "When I was your age, I was wondering where is the best place to go to pray. Well, I asked Jesus that question. His answer was, "Why don't you go into the heart of my Father" So I did. I went into the heart of the Father, and all these years that's where I have prayed. Now I see everyone as my own child. How can I judge anyone?" (Tales From the Magic Monastery)

Sept. Reflections on Healing and Forgiveness

2006-09-13T19:24:00.000-07:00

Dear Sisters and Brothers,

Sept. is a time when my soul begins to turn more inward and I am drawn to reflection after a time of outdoor activity and physical work. Significant events have happened in my life and in the life of the world I know in Sept. The shadows lengthen and past associations emerge from memory and consciousness. The recent commemoration of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, five years ago have also turned me towards reflection. I am troubled by the exploitation in the commemorations and rhetoric of grief and injury, and superficial sentimental patriotism to justify further injury and violence in the world, and to gain political advantage. These are the outward public manifestations of the "Domination Paradigm" articulated so well in our current readings by Beatrice Butreau. Rather than being entirely reactive I want to take my own revulsion at the culture of this society, of which I have been too often an adherent, towards a renewed commitment to live in the Communion Paradigm that is the Ultimate Reality that all of us are called to, to breathe Yeshua and be rooted in his Love, and to find my home ever in his belonging as the sole Reality to be lived, the gateway for followers of Yeshua to return to their true Home, in this life and the next.

Sept. is the month I was married 33 years ago. Sept. is the month my son was born. Sept 13, today, is the day my son died, 26 years ago. And I recall so vividly as I held his lifeless body in my arms, the face, the body I had come to cherish, the feeling of utter desolation, that my beloved son was gone and there was nothing I could do, no one or no thing to blame or hold responsible. I recall the sense of failure as a father that I had, that I had not protected him from disease and harm and death. In such desolation, surrender and Grace, and even healing, can happen. Since then I have come to appreciate how the world we know can disappear, the loved ones we hold dear can be taken, our very life can be gone, in an instant. To face and live this truth with courage, and trust, and to love the best we can is how healing happens.

Sadly the culture of this country has sought vengeance as a false means of healing, as a way of avoiding accepting our vulnerability. A country and a people that had nothing to do with the injuries of Sept. 11 have been targeted, (even a belated Senate Intelligence report verifies this). And for the 3 thousand Americans that died, more than a hundred thousand Iraqis have died, mostly non-combatant women and children(by report of U. of Johns Hopkins) and continue daily in the death squads and bombings of ethnic violence, in addition to another 3000 young Americans who were told they were fighting for the freedom and safety of their country, and another 27 thousand who are maimed and disabled in body, and the many tens of thousands who are maimed and disabled in soul. Americans continue to think that our losses and our injuries are the only ones that hurt, and our will, our power, our dominance, and our safety is the only imperative in the world. We forget that the whole of humankind suffers and grieves, and has a need to be safe and secure, especially those in the Middle East. And still the anger and the desire for vengeance goes on, the blaming and leveraging for political domination goes on. And so little of healing that the people need and long for is being sought.

From the mouths of children-
I saw a television program this week interviewing children whose parents died in 9/11. It was touching and revealing and instructive. What was clear to me is that these children, who had the most devastating loss of all, (what is worse than for a child to lose his or her parent?) were in their own way, quietly seeking healing. A daughter who still cries when speaking of her dad, said that she learned after a while, that the only way she could feel any thing but sadness and despair, was to do a good deed for someone else, and that could bring her happiness. A son, who missed his father terribly, decided to pursue a career similar to his father and to emulate the fine and honorable qualities his father had shown him. The children found they could share their vulnerabilities with other children who had lost a parent in the attack. Such basic wisdom shows us the path to healing (the true meaning of the word, salvation) is open to all of us, if we find a way to let go of the mind's compulsion for control. (At a later time I also found purpose for my pain in working with other parents who lost children, and finding communion of love and purpose in our common vulnerability.) Some of wives and loved ones who suffered loss on 9/11 have involved themselves in projects to promote healing and peace, including a group of widows who have travelled to Afghanistan to make common cause with widows who have lost husbands there.

The Way of Peace and Healing-
On Sept. 11 this week I walked in a silent contemplative group peace walk, in commemoration of another anniversary. On September 11, 1906, one hundred years ago, Mohandas Gandhi began what would become the non-violent, passive resistance movement for which he is so famous. It began, not in India, but in South Africa, at the time part of the British Empire, where he learned many of the skills he would later put to good use. Gandhi called this practice Satyagraha, the Indian Movement which is born out of truth and love or nonviolence. It became the motivating ethos and strategy for the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s led by the Rev. Martin Luther King. A strange juxtaposition....that events that have led to healing, and to injury and brutality should happen on the same day. Is humankind not being presented with a choice, to choose the path of healing and peace, or to choose the path of repeating the endless cycle of injury and retribution, and counter-retribution?

Forgiveness and Restorative Justice-
Much was made on 9/11 about the strength of religious faith in helping people survive adversity, trauma, and loss. I recall at the time, the mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, who has been so lionized for his leadership in crisis, speaking of how religious faith was for him and New Yorkers the great salvific force. Yet I also heard him say that his greatest wish was to personally kill Osama Bin Laden in retribution for his role in the massacre. We all wished to be safe, but violent retribution is not safety. No one in those days spoke of the words of Yeshua inviting us to a better way, or his words saying that "whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do to me." And who, if not Osama Bin Laden, qualifies as "the least of these." No one said the words of Jesus as he faced his own humiliation and death, "Forgive them, Abba, for they know not what they do." No one invoked the beatitudes, "Blessed are the merciful, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are the humble, blessed are you when you are persecuted." In our vulnerability and our no-thingness we find the Communion Paradigm, we enter the Kingdom and the Kingdom enters us.

I say these things not because I practice them so well, but because I need to hear them myself. I know what it is to be captive of unforgiveness and to desire retaliation. When I was a young adolescent, someone in authority brought a terrible injury to me, willfully and maliciously. I nearly lost my life in despair. It is a human, healthy, and perhaps a necessary defense to have rage in response to injury. It is not helpful, healing, or holy to hold on to the injury, and to nurture the resentment and the desire to cause injury in return. As an adult at a certain juncture in my own healing of soul it became clear that this space in my soul needed the touch of the Healing Master, and I was the one who would give permission for this touch, to open it to the Light.

To aid in this process I sought a guide and advocate and Grace brought such a person to me. She is an Episcopal priest, a woman who has made it her vocation to practice what she calls, "Restorative Justice." Restorative Justice is the companion to forgiveness. In forgiveness we eventually learn, out of compassion for ourselves and the desire to be more accessible to the love of the Beloved, we must find a way to let go of our identification with the pain and the injury, and our obsession with the perpetrator. With Restorative Justice we engage with the perpetrator in finding mutual healing and in a process of change so injuries are corrected and not repeated. Such is not always possible, but it is the inner work of the Communion Paradigm we are called to do. Prayer of the Heart opens us to the possibility.

This process led to a face to face meeting, nearly two years ago with the perpetrator of the injury that was inflicted on me. There had been preliminary meetings and actions on both parties leading to this meeting. At the meeting I was surprised to find, in a place of empowerment I found no need for retribution, but saw how the injury had done much greater harm to the one who inflicted it as it was written on his face. And I saw the suffering of a lifetime it had imposed and was moved. And I was grateful for the way Grace had brought my injury to healing and, more than that, had made it a primary instrument of my growth as beloved child of the Holy One. I was able to speak my truth directly and hear the contrition and sorrow in return. Healing had happened for both. My guide was a witness to this great Mercy of Yeshua the Christ.

In the debriefing with my guide afterward it seemed that old words "sin and salvation" had new and different meaning. I asked her how she came to do this work. She said at some time in her life, she just knew this was her calling. I hope it shall be one day recognized as a true spiritual profession of advocate and guide, a profession of healing.

The Cross and the Lotus-
In the Christian Mystical tradition the Cross is a symbol of how Divine Love and healing make the wounds of existence into the sacred wounds of Christ that become for us the means by which we learn to be a vessel of Agape, the redemptive Self-Gift of God. In Buddhism, the Lotus is the symbol of the flower of enlightenment and awakening that brings forth compassion for all beings. It is rooted and born in the mud of the pain and suffering of existence, that becomes transformed through spiritual practice into unitive experience. Our brother, Thich Nhat Hanh, has so beautifully expressed this in his own life. He admits to periods of despair, depression, and post-traumatic stress in his life from the violence and loss of the Vietnam war. Out of this suffering he has grown through his spiritual practice the lotus of profound compassion and teachings to help people heal and find peace.

What I and countless others have experienced on an individual level has relevance for the community and global level. When nations, peoples, and religions become so tired and spent with the suffering of endless cycles of violence and retribution, then perhaps the way of forgiveness and healing shall be the way of all. When humankind, out of profound suffering, can open to the grace of contrition and conversion, then shall healing be possible. The mystic tradition across the globe can lead the way. I have practiced in both the mystic traditions of Christianity and Buddhism. Mystics have the goal and the experience of learning to abide and live from the Communion Paradigm. A great teacher I encountered on the way, Thomas Hand S.J., proclaimed a simple truth among a group of retreatants I was with, "The God experience is an experience of Oneness, and fully accepting and living the consequences." This is true whether one names the Ultimate as God, Brahmin, Dharmakaya, Allah, Ela, or Allaha, Grandfather, Grandmother, or XYZen. In this Oneness there is no self, and no other, there is just the One Life, the One Self, in whom we all find our belonging. The Divine belongs to no person, no religion, no nationality, but we all belong to the Unity from which all things arise. In this Unity, this One Life, we can learn, in the words of Paul, "to live, and move, and have our being." As Jesus said in his promise to us, "On that day you will know that I am in my Father and you in me, and I in you. (John 14:20)

May that day be today, and every day, to the end of our days. May the Grace and healing of Yeshua's love be ours always, and may we continue in the work of healing our soul and the soul of humankind.
Sept.Blessings to all,
Bill Ryan

The Praxis of the Ethos of Love

2006-06-11T13:08:00.000-07:00

The Praxis of the Ethos of Love

Our decisions regarding our thoughts, words, and deeds, in what we do, in what we fail to do, or avoid doing, are the pivot point of our spiritual life. If prayer is the turning of the will towards God, then all of life is prayer. Most especially the process by which we decide what we shall do is prayer, and the fruits of our inner life of God, or lack of it. I recall a Zen teacher saying that the fullness of spiritual practice happens when deep meditation meets the conditions of life where we find ourselves.

In most Buddhist traditions there are moral precepts that are taken that become the daily basis for an examination of conscience, and a measure for which one is acting from the deepest inner reservoir of compassion and loving kindness or not. In the Christian tradition the great commandment of love cited by Jesus from the Jewish Torah is the basis of all moral discernment. “ 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)

Here Jesus tells us the basis of the spiritual life is also the basis of our moral life. Relational life, of which the essence is self-offering love, is the ground on which we base all decision making and discernment in our daily life and prayer practice. He tells us that the way in to this kind of life is one of continual conversion, a letting go of those misdirections and attachments of the mind that have taken the place of right relationship in love. That includes and begins with the activity of the mind where misdirection or sin happens. Jesus also tells us that the vertical and the horizontal relationship are not separate. God is the one Self that we love, both alone in solitude and in all the relationships of our human life. What gives injury or neglect to either affects the entire matrix of our relational life in God. Christ is the living spring in our Heart, Christ is the living presence in those beings we encounter in our lives. The symbol of the cross in a circle so often found in the Celtic tradition symbolizes the totality of the vertical and horizontal relationship of the communion paradigm of Christ.

We have a daily practice of silent communion with Christ at intervals in the day. As we orient the soul toward this communion state as the ongoing state of choice we become increasingly aware of what opposes or injures this state of communion. So in a sense those thoughts, those words and deeds that are unloving, injurious, exploitive or cruel either in intention or effect become increasingly disturbing to our interior life in God. The more we practice the more attuned we become to those disturbances. At the end of the day the residue of that disturbance is likely to be accessible and noticed by us, a disturbance to interior peace. That is why our evening practice is a good time to review the day in a daily examination of conscience. We can note where we have caused injury and where we have neglected to love and serve as our heart's desire calls us. There is no room for the guilt of judgment of our goodness or badness as a person. That only feeds the fiction of a perfected ego and creates a block in our complete acceptance and responsibility for what we have done, what we have failed to do, and to direct our energies toward contrition and conversion. Acceptance means accepting the natural sadness when injury is done to love. Those injuries can come in many ways, lies, betrayals, harshness, pridefulness and self deception, taking what isn't freely given, hurtful anger, and so on.

True contrition comes from the understanding that life arises fresh each moment, and contrition allows us to drop the burden of the distant past, or even the previous moment and return to our heart's desire to be given to love. This is the freedom of conversion, and the wisdom that real repentance is re-directing our life towards true happiness, what we most want and desire. This is true metanoia, coming home, again and again and again.. ceaselessly. We are all the prodigal child, having dissipated and wasted the gift of our life essence, again and again. Yet the door is always open and the arms always welcoming us, a million times in the course of a day or a lifetime. The important thing is to return home to the Heart,and learn compassion from the pain inflicted on ourselves and others. The true wound is separateness, which heals as we harmonize the soul with unitive life in God.

By examining the circumstance of the thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions we have made, we can learn from them and bring the fullness of our practice into that situation when it arises again, as it will in various forms. Our practice is always to observe the mind and to abide in the heart. When we are able to "see", to witness the arising of misdirected hidden thoughts and motivations we can truly offer them up, and relinquish them to make space for our most essential desire, which is loving kindness or agape. The desert elders saw that true conversion must involve a praxis of freedom from addictive or destructive thinking patterns. (There is much more to be said about Prayer of the Heart praxis with thoughts, which can be added in another post.) Over time we cultivate Heart Presence as a ceaseless expression of Prayer of the Heart in daily life and activity, making each moment of life prayer.

The following is an example of the incorporation of reflection on the day and the praxis of contrition and conversion, integrated into the evening prayer practice:

Evening Prayer of the Heart-
- Opening Chant- "Yeshua, Yeshua" and Prayer of Consecration

-Formal Silent Prayer of the Heart Practice- One or more sessions.

-Review of the Day/ Evening Recollection-" O Beloved- Help me to know all the ways I have injured your Love this day. Help me to know the ways I have not loved you in all my being and all my doing. Help me to know all the ways I have not loved my neighbor as myself." ( silent pause and reflection on the day)

- Contrition and Conversion-" O Beloved, I resolve to claim the sorrow of every injury to love and to seek the grace of Your conversion this moment and always."

-Evening Devotional Prayer, Prayer of Jesus, and Intercessions-

-Closing Night Chant- "Into Your hands Abba, I commend my spirit, Into Your hands, Abba/Amma, I commend my spirit. In Christ we are given to You, day and night. Into Your hands, Abba, I commend my spirit."

I hope your find this response helpful in considering your own practice of ethical/moral discernment of the day.

The Main Thing- A Paradigm for the Christian Mystical Tradition

2006-06-08T20:40:00.000-07:00

The Main Thing-
A Paradigm for the Christian Mystical Tradition

The only reasonable measure for Christianity or any religious movement is the degree to which it has brought healing and transformation to the soul of humankind. By this measure all major religions of the world have failed. The Jesus of the Gospels says clearly that "By their fruits you shall know them." (Matt. 7:16) He proclaims to all that the measure of a lifetime is the extent that we come to see his life and presence in all beings, especially those who are the most forgotten, the least powerful, and the most abysmally rejected. "What you have done to the least of these you have done to me." (Matt. 25:40)

When asked what is the most important thing in human existence Jesus called upon the foundational statement of the Jewish Torah: “ 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) Unitive love here is the main thing, the only thing. He is unequivocal that all of law and the wisdom of the prophets is in this. Life is one in God. Life in God is relational self-offering love given in the fullest measure. Many who might find inspiration in this turn their backs on Christianity as a religious movement. Historic institutional and cultural Christianity has become obsessed with power, influence, and lines of authority. It uses fear of a condemning deity who is self-obsessed with what human creatures are compliant and who are not. To be a life-giving way, the Way of Yeshua must exist as a mystic spiritual paradigm. The way of the Christos must be a way of love that is unitive with the Divine in all Creation.

Mystic Path- Learning Path of Trust
Unlike the path of religion the mystic path is not belief based but learning based. We can only begin with a simple faith that there is a Life greater than our own ego from whom our own human life, our own human soul/consciousness arises. We have an intuition of this, and an awakening desire to return Home to this Life. This is the basis of authentic faith. As we grow we discover, we uncover this One Life from whom we arise, and to whom we return. In our growth the mythic religion of our indoctrination is often shattered. The mythic sky-God of our human made doctrines dies and the mystic Life of our life lives. Our journey of uncovering will reveal there is no original sin in us, there is no great gulf between our being and the Life of the universe. What we do know is that Heart of the Beloved is within our heart.

The End of Ritual Killing
Therefore there is no great expiation sacrifice to be made for our sins, no salvific gesture that redeems us from our innate and corrupted image of God within. Many see Augustine's theory as a projection of his own unhealed addictions and judgments of the soul, and not the common ground of our humanity. The original sin/damnation theory of human existence is and has been a tragic inhibiting misdirection in the growth of the human soul's passage on this planet. The harmful consequences and damage by Augustine's theology to the spiritual consciousness of the Christian world is well described in the work of Mathew Fox and other writers of our time.

Christianity and Judaism arose from a primitive desert culture that believed in animal sacrifice to appease an unseen warrior/protector deity. In this culture it was convenient to let Jesus of Nazareth be the lamb of God to be ritually slain in public, a fulfillment of the messianic mythology of the Judaic tradition of Passover. Such a death might be assimilated through Paul's interpretation as the once and for all ritual sacrifice that ended the need for such, especially once the Jewish temple and Jerusalem was destroyed, where all such sacrifices were to happen. In the light of mystic awakening slaughtering animals or humans has no meaning or need, but is seen for what it is, the acting out of unconscious magical beliefs. The Lamb of God instead may be a powerful symbol of the vulnerability and tenderness of a Divine Life within the heart of each of us. In this way Yeshua becomes the revelation of who we are in our true nature in God, and who God is incarnate in the world.

Mystic Yeshua- Cosmic Christos
This brings us to the important question: If Yeshua is not the historic blood sacrifice to appease an angry deity from punishing a corrupt humanity, then who is the historic Yeshua, and in what way is he the Christ, the anointed One? In what way is the Christos the Way, the Truth, and the Life, salvific Life within us?

When considering salvation for humanity, we must examine more closely what is the need of the human species, what is the nature of the human condition, and what is true salvation?

The Genesis story describes in myth and metaphor, and poetry, the central wound in the human condition and the damaging consequences of it through time. In the beginning we, all of us, enjoy the knowledge of our essential oneness with the Source of all being, all life, all existence. It is the garden of our Beloved. We walk in communion with the Divine and our companion creation. It is a condition of nakedness, of no-self consciousness. When the duality of a separate self is created, and with it the polarities of good and evil, the garden experience is lost. As a result of this separate-self consciousness greed, envy, fear, and violence become the lot of human-kind, as illustrated in the fratricide story of Cain and Abel.

The story can only be understood as an esoteric myth about what happens to all of us, in the course of each life. We come into the world with an innate understanding, or memory of our ontological communion with the Divine. Yet what we have a growing experience of separateness in our own soul influenced by the collective soul or consciousness of those human communities where we find ourselves. From this wound issues forth all of the spiritual and moral ills of the world, and all of the terrible and tragic consequences that afflict humankind.

If the Christian revelation has any validity, it must be that in the historic Yeshua, is the opening, the revelation, a doorway and offering of the Love of the Divine Relationship we call Trinity. There is an invitation in to be in personal communion with the Divine in the mystical Yeshua. We can experience the healing of the wounds of the soul in his limitless love and to abide there always (John 15:9). The same emanation of Divine Light and Love manifest in the historic Jesus, is present and offered to us in the personal mystic Yeshua, is present and joined to us in the immanent Divine Christos in the entirety of the Cosmos. Through his love we can open to communion with the Cosmic Christ, the immanent Life of the Divine present in all Creation. And in this way our separateness with the world is healed, and we are then able to participate in the unitive relational Life of the Trinity present and accessible to all Creation as the Mystical Body of Christ.

This is a mystical theology of the Cosmic Christos that is beyond most "traditional" teachings. Yet it is the grand insight and vision of mystics in the Christian tradition from the earliest centuries to the inspiring vision of Teilhard de Chardin and present day pilgrims of the Way. Gregory of Nazianzius said, "Christ exists in all things that are." Morgan of Wales a Celtic teacher and monk of the fourth century said, " The presence of God's spirit in all living things is what makes them beautiful." And Teilhard de Chardin says, " Through your incarnation, my God, all matter is henceforth incarnate." (Mass of the World)

Communion Paradigm
Beatrice Butreau, a contemplative writer of our time(The Holy Thursday Revelution), says that the profound healing of the human condition comes to us in Yeshua's revelation of the "Communion Paradigm" as the true nature of things. The communion paradigm is the realm of unitive love in God. It is the true resurrection experience, where through the personal healing of the mystical Yeshua we come to full participation and belonging in the Universal Christos. In this way the domination paradigm, born of the damaged consciousness of separateness is healed and the possibilities of spiritual growth and development of the human species become realized. We make ourselves accessible to this offering of healing through the praxis and grace of awakening and self-offering love. In the communion paradigm those who follow the Way of Yeshua find it treads the same common ground, and touches and opens to the same Ultimate Reality of the Way of the Buddha, the Prophet, and the other mystic paths of the peoples of the earth.

The Divine Christos-The Incarnation Creation Story

Chandogya Upanishad- "In the beginning was only Being. One without a second. Out of himself he brought forth the cosmos. And entered into everything in it. There is nothing that does not come forth from him. Of everything he is the inmost Self. He is the truth; he is the Self supreme." chapt. 6 vs. 2.2

The Astrophysics story- The researchers collected observations of this polarization signal to create a map of the early universe, allowing them to test a sub-theory within the Big Bang theory, called "inflation."

Inflation theory states that the universe underwent a rapid expansion immediately following the Big Bang…"During this growth spurt, a tiny region, likely no larger than a marble, grew in a trillionth of a second to become larger than the visible universe," said WMAP researcher David Spergel, also from Princeton University.

The new observations reveal that the early expansion wasn't smooth, with some regions expanding faster than others….These fluctuations are thought to have led to clumping of matter that allowed the formation of galaxies.Brian Greene, a physicist from Columbia University who wasn't involved in the research, called the new findings"spectacular"and"stunning." http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060316_wmap_results.html

Revelations of Divine Love-Julian of Norwich- "Also in this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness]. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God."

Gospel of John -" In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was Life, and the Life was the Light of the people." (John 1:2-4)

All the systems of matter, biology, and consciousness that have arisen are manifestation of the One Life that animates and holds us into being. The amazing thing, the Main Thing, is that intimacy with the mystic Yeshua brings us into intimacy with the Cosmic Christ in all Creation, making us full members and participants in the universal mystical body of Christ, the One Incarnate Life.

Wisdom Schools

2006-05-01T11:50:00.001-07:00

(Dear Friends,
This post will be controversial. Yet I hope it will stimulate reflection.
I hope you will read it with openness.
Blessings,
Bill Ryan)

Wisdom Schools- A New Vision of the Transmission of the Christ Mystery

The Legacy of Religion
Many theologians and scholars will say that Yeshua of Nazareth did not come to found a religion. Rather he wished to transmit in himself and his teachings a revelation of the Source of Life whom he knew as Abba. Yet what is the legacy of religion, both Christian and that of other traditions? What are the fruits of the great institutional structures, cathedrals, and temples? What are the contributions of the caste system of clergy and denominations that have multiplied throughout the world? What are the great contributions to the healing of humankind after all the money and resources dedicated to religion have been tallied? What we have are centuries of wars fueled by religious hatred, wars of conquest and colonial expansion under the symbols of both cross and crescent. We have endured wars of genocide fueled by ethnic and religious distrust and fear. Millions have been persecuted, killed, exploited, or sent into exile. This is the legacy of religion.

In the U.S. public attitudinal sampling reports consistently that Christian church goers are most likely to have attitudes in favor of the death penalty, supporting violent solutions to international conflict, opposed to compassionate social policies for the most vulnerable populations, and least tolerant or accepting of persons who are different in ethnicity or sexual orientation. If we look around the world, many of the most violent actions and conflicts between peoples have religion at their source. "By their fruits you shall know them."

If religion has any benefit for human kind it must be the capacity to bring healing and transformation to the soul of humankind, bringing forth the fruit of compassionate concern and service to the world. Instead those who are most religious seem to be most callous and hardened towards others, and the least mindful and responsible in their relationship with the natural systems of life around them. Those who are most religious seem to be most inclined toward violence and hatred. The least progressive societies, in measures of meeting basic needs and enacting compassion and peace-making in their social, economic, and foreign relations, are those who are the most religious. The most progressive societies in those same measures are those who are the most secular in their political and cultural make-up.

For this reason a genuine critique, a prophetic examination of the structure of religion, it institutions, and practices must be undertaken. Perhaps what we need in the world is a lot less religion and a lot more committed and serious spiritual practice.

The Structure of Religion-
Where we have been-
Whether it be Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Judaism or other religious structures and "isms" in the world, it can be said that without exception through the centuries all have betrayed the teachings of their founders. The structures, values, traditions, and activities of religion have been largely possessed and contaminated by the cultures and history of the peoples and geography they occupy. Religions have come to serve themselves and not the healing of the world. Today, more than ever, religion is at the center of the divisions and violence that scar humankind. And religions again seek to aggrandize themselves with political power and dominance in the societies where they dwell. Religions market the emotional massage and psychological consolations that keep us from truly living into transformative life. They convince the adherents to find refuge in the small circles of familiar ethnic and cultural prejudice rather than the expansive and transformative universal Heart and unitive ethos of the Divine. Religions are without exception primarily at the service of their own power and prestige and not at the service of spiritual healing to humankind. Religions reinforce rather than heal the central wound of separateness that afflicts humankind. This is unacceptable.

A New Direction-
We do not need more institutions and more clergy demanding ever more financial support in this world. We do not need a religious caste system of ministers, priests, and monks who enjoy a privileged position of deference and authority in human communities. We do not need intermediaries with the sacred. Rather we need to start with a new premise, the revolutionary premise of Yeshua the Christ that the temple of the Divine is not on the hill, not in structures, nor in brick or stone, nor in creeds or dogmas. Rather the temple of the Divine is the Heart, the spiritual center within us all. What humans need are teachers and companions of the Way, who will walk with us, teach and support us in the disciplines of awareness and will that open our soul/consciousness to the Ultimate and true dwelling place of the Spirit of the Beloved within us. What we need is the praxis to transform the soul that it becomes the lamp of the Light of Christ in the world, rather than the distorted and opaque vessel of confusion, despair, fear resulting in human compulsions of greed and power and resultant violence.

Wisdom Schools-
When the historical Jesus was living, his followers did not call him, "priest, minister, reverend, cardinal, or pope." Indeed his followers called him "teacher," and Jesus said in the end he wished to be called "friend." A soul friend, or anam cara, is someone who shares the fruits of inner life of the Beloved with another, who walks with another on the Way. (In the earliest years of the Jesus movement, those who were his followers were called the people of the "Way.") Spiritual transmission comes through teachers and soul friends, not through authoritative intermediaries. The Light of Christ is transmitted truly in this way to the people of the Way. For this reason we should be considering models of spiritual community other than denominational churches and parishes with their agendas for power and societal status. Is not the spiritual journey, is not the life of Faith (not belief), one of discovery and opening to what is beyond the egoic mind and consciousness? We need spiritual teachers and soul friends, who support us on the Way, who continually point to the true Teacher and true Friend, Christ, within us. He is already at the center of our Heart, why do we need grand buildings, institutions, and political power to possess what is already offered to us in each moment, the unconditional love and healing of the Divine Beloved in the universal mystical Christ? We can live a life of communion with Christ our true and universal friend and healer of the soul- our Way to experience the Divine Beloved who is the Heart of Creation. And from this healing of our wound of separateness the compassionate life is born.

Blessings to all,
Bill Ryan

Lenten Praxis

2006-03-13T12:16:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,
I wrote this little piece about Lenten spiritual practice. I hope you find it has some merit in considering your own approach to the season of Lent.
Many blessings,
Bill Ryan

Lenten Practice in Prayer of the Heart
By Bill Ryan

The time of Lent has had a penitential theme in years and centuries past, implying a certain self-punitive expiation for sins. As a child growing up in the pre-Vatican II era of the Roman Catholic Church I never found that expiation theology satisfying but the liturgies and symbols did touch me and move me.

Lent- the Interior Movement of Purification
Through my practice of Prayer of the Heart these many years I have come to an appreciation of the theology and practice of kenosis as central to the spiritual life. I have also come to appreciate the time of preparation in the 40 days Yeshua spent in the desert and that any important transformation in life involves a period of preparation and sustained inner work of purification. In the transformations of grace and deepening communion with God our preparation involves an emptying and opening to allow the love and grace of God to come alive in us, and to heal those wounds and addictive patterns in our soul that keep us bound. So Lent is a time of breaking out of the bondage of entrenched patterns so that we can be an empty and receptive vessel for the Light of Christ to burn brightly. Simplicity is the true meaning of purification, being freed to be wholly given to our heart's desire.

The Liturgical Year- Our Growth in the Christ Mystery
In the liturgical year, starting in Advent we liturgically enact the Christ Mystery in our human lives. The Calmaldolese monk Bruno Barnhardt restates the central truth of the Christ Mystery from the original statement by Athanasius (3rd c.) that in Yeshua the Divine became human so that humans might become divine. This understanding of Christianity of Theosis (Divinization) has remained central in the Christian East since the time of the earliest centuries of the desert tradition and the early articulations of the Greek Fathers. In Advent and Christmas therefore we celebrate the Incarnation of the Light of Christ not only historically but also in our own inner being, the Heart.

The Fire and Light of Christ, however, remains a dormant potential deep within us unless we do the inner work of the actualization of "theosis." We offer our soul/consciousness to become accessible, infused, and alive with the Light of Christ already present and living within the tabernacle of the Heart or true spirit. This is the praxis we do in Prayer of the Heart. We unite the soul with the Christ Light of the True Spirit or Heart within us. This is our inner work in Prayer of the Heart.

In the action of kenosis we give our will and awareness to self-emptying, a liberation from all that is non-essential, to receive and live our true essence in Christ. In this way the words of St. Paul, "I live no longer I (the ego-mind), but Christ (the Life of Christ) lives in me.)." (Gal. 2:20) In our praxis we release from the patterns of a lifetime, and the residue and wounds of existence so that the space and freedom is present for Christ to live fully in us, to bring us to healing and wholeness.

Living the Paschal Mystery
This is the inner work of transformation and self emptying we do in our daily silent sitting practice and in the endless praxis of consecrated bowing in adoration and self offering in love we do inwardly in the middle of activity. During Lent we can bring a special energy to this work of freedom, the freedom to release from all that we aren't, to become all that we truly are in Christ. This work of freedom brings us to the Holy Week Triduum and the enactment of the Paschal Mystery of death and resurrection. This is the liturgical enactment of our own death to the self-created, separate self, and the rising to the Limitless Life that is the Heart of Christ, our True Life. We become the lit flame of the Light of Christ. We can truly chant with all Creation as the candles are lit from the Paschal Christ candle on Easter sunrise, "Lumen Christi- Light of Christ, Deo Gratias- Thanks be to God." This is our true destiny, to become a lit flame of Christ's Love, and to live His Light and share it with the world living the compassionate life in the season of Pentecost through the end of the liturgical year and the remainder of our days in the human state.

Lenten Praxis
As a child I was drawn to the liturgies of the Stations of the Cross and the practices of fasting that adults did. The fasting was a canonically enforced practice and the adults rarely understood why they were doing it. The notion of "giving up" something for Lent was done, but again without much understanding of the value as a praxis. We have just begun to explore a notion in the lexicon of ecological spirituality known as "voluntary simplicity." It means stripping away the unnecessary and burdensome patterns of consumption and attachment in our life in order to get down to what is essential. (No small task in this consumer driven culture.) This comes closer to the wisdom meaning of Lent in the liturgical calendar.

It is not the material order of Creation that is the impediment in our spiritual journey of liberation. What constitutes the blocking of our grown in communion with Christ is the attachment of human consciousness to "things" or addictive patterns as God substitutes, to attempt to fill the soul's hunger, craving, and emptiness. In the wisdom of the beatitudes it is the seeming paradox that in our emptying, as Yeshua does in the desert, that we confront the adversary of the ego-mind and the temptations to find God substitutes.

In our practice of kenosis we can come to find the vast spaciousness where the Divine dwells in our own Hearts, and come Home to our true belonging in the Sanctuary of the Heart. In the emptying of this kenosis we are prepared to become the vessels of the Life of the Risen Christ in our own life.

If we wish to make Yeshua our life, Yeshua our home, and Yeshua our singular Love, we must give ourselves wholeheartedly to the daily consecration of the undivided presence and will to become ceaseless adoration and ceaseless self-offering. We find liberation and healing from a divided life when we can become so fully given and freed from the divided life our attachments to God substitutes inflict on us. Regardless of our station in life we can all be "monos", monastics in the true sense of being fully consecrated to the Living God. What divides us from our deepest desire manifests differently in individual lives, but is something we face regardless of our station in life. The "consecrated life" is possible for all.

Given to our Deepest Longing
Our ongoing inner work of love is the commitment. In this way we become accessible to Love's gift of Self to us. Our deepest longing is this, and this alone. In this way the liturgies and the traditional practices of fasting and detachment can become truly enlivened. The Way of the Cross, as a devotional form of prayer, can become a profound enactment of our own path of liberation and transcendence.

Therefore we can approach Lent as an essential movement of our growth in communion with Christ. In Prayer of the Heart praxis we exercise vigilant awareness and release from our the mind's enmeshment with those patterns of living, of mental and behavioral compulsion, that divide us from being fully consecrated to the Love of Christ in all things.

We may decide to choose at least one habitual pattern to release from and offer up. At the same time we may also consider in what ways we can intensify our daily practice, possibly by increasing the time of silent sitting in prayer. For most people the primary impediment is getting to bed early at night so they can rise early in the morning and have more uninterrupted prayer time before they start the day. Intensifying or re-examining our vow of practice or daily rule of life can be an important commitment to make.

Choosing the Better Part
Yeshua tells us we must choose between our misdirected desire for psychological security and comfort and our true desire for God. Commitment or avoidance is an inescapable choice. 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 the rich young man Yeshua challenges him to give over everything to his heart's desire. (Matt. 27:57) His fear erodes his desire. 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.

Therefore let us discover anew the season of Lent and Easter as a season of consecration, a season of healing of the divided life, a season of renewed commitment. Let it become a sacred and spacious time of freedom and unbinding of those vital energies within us that want to be given and united in the utter simplicity of our heart's desire. We can choose the better part wholeheartedly: Yeshua, our companion, our path, our destination and our home.

The Deep Peace of the Son of Peace

2006-02-20T19:23:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,

A familiar Celtic blessing ends with this wish: "The Deep Peace of the Son of Peace be with You."
For me it is an intuitively satisfying blessing. We experience peace as a condition of the soul when we find home, sanctuary, and belonging. Peace is not an emotional state. It is state that emerges from deep within. And at the same time we know that we have a desire to have peace in the world around us, a longing that seems to go unrealized every day. There is a spoken prayer that is a favorite of mine, "Let there be peace in the world, and let it begin with me." We do not decide whether there will be peace in the world. We do decide whether we can bring forth the gift of peace to the world. Such a peace that surpasses understanding begins in the heart and our praxis of communion with the Son of Peace.

As I journey through this year of transition from the world of my past profession and from our previous residence to the new one in Salem, Oregon. Even as I am immersed more deeply into the retreat experience of greater intensity of practice, I am aware also that human beings are in a time of dangerous global passage, where the violent conflicts may break out in a more horrible way. News reports warn of an impending attack on Iran by the United States and Israel, an attack that will inevitably lead to wider, and possibly nuclear war.

Like Merton who wrote his "Confessions of a Guilty Bystander" I wonder what can I do. I can share my concern and be a witness to a better way than massive violence under the pretense of a safer world. More importantly I can find my sole refuge in the only peace that is truly inseparable from every human being who sincerely seeks it. The Heart of Christ is my refuge, my home, and my peace. There is no other even though the world should explode and end.

Yeshua whispers to us, "Peace is my gift to you, my own peace I give to you, that the world cannot give." John 14:27 This peace of Christ we can all bring forth in the shining lamp of our own souls. We can shine the Light within us in the world and be a witness to it. This we can all do, and I am at peace when I consecrate myself to what can be done rather than go into the despair of I can't do.
The peace of Christ be with us all, Friends.
Bill Ryan

Mythical Christmas and Mystical Christmas

2005-12-18T19:27:00.000-08:00

Friends,

The fundamentalist right seems to be much inclined to worry whether people greet each other with "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holiday." This argument has nothing to do with authentic Christmas values and much to do with tribal symbols, affiliation, and cultural dominance. Whose flag is the dominant one, whose group is the greater and in charge? These are their anxieties. At such a time the cultural and political forces waging this war are very much concerned with giving more of the nation's resources to the already affluent while the minimum safety net of food, health care, and shelter is cut even more. A sad, sad, path to take, and one which will bear bitter fruit for years to come.

I long ago signed off the cultural Christmas we now have in this land, of consumption, buying, selling, and the overall escalation of expectations and stress in people's lives. No presents, no cards, no tree, no decorations. I do have a small Christmas altar as part of a larger altar. That suits me fine.

As I puzzle over this I wonder how what is essentially a pre-Christian Northern European pagan festival came to be a celebration of the birth of Christ, particularly when we consider that the birth of Yeshua, the Christ is thought to have happened in April. I'm all for celebrations of lights in the middle of dark winter, but let's not make it more than it is. Let's search deeper.

The story is a good one, the Revelation of Divine Light, the King come to heal the land. That's one that many, if not all cultures, can understand. A child born in poverty, who will challenge empires, principalities, powers, and the priorities of societies like the present American one. But what does this story have to do with here and now, this moment and the next? The story is the mythical dimension of religion, but without something more, it's just a story, a beautiful one perhaps, but it's not my story, or the story of the Universe.

The icon of Christ Pantocrator is the compelling one for us. Christ who is at the Center of the Cosmos and the Center of our own Hearts. The Mystical dimension is the doorway in, what gives life and purpose to the myth. (Myth here does not mean "untrue") The Mystical dimension is the unitive spiritual dimension. Mystical Christmas is a celebration of a spiritual truth that happens to all of us as either actualized or unrealized potential. The Light of Christ can be born, can be revealed in each of us, can come forth if we allow, if we surrender to the longing for this birthing to happen in each of us, whether we be Christian or not. The One Life, that Christians know as the Trinity, the "I AM" Source of all existence, known by countless other names in other traditions, wants to be manifest and lived, consciously and intentionally in our own life.

Hence the goal of the spiritual life, the goal of religious practice, is not to simply venerate the historical events of Yeshua of Nazareth, or proclaim our tribal and group affiliation with this historic personage. The purpose of our life is bring forth, to actualize the same Light that Christians know as Christ in the life and humanity that is the human vessel of our own brief life on this earth. In this way the liturgical celebration of Advent and Christmas carries therefore deep significance. The historical event and the mystical process are joined in us and in the moment to moment choice we make to be present and open in presence and adoration to Divine Light and to offer the gift of our human self, our human will and faculties to this same Light and Love who wishes to be born and live fully in us. The goal of the Christian journey is not primarily to venerate the historical Jesus but to birth and live the mystical Christ-Christosis.

Christmas Peace and Blessings to All,
Bill Ryan

Who am I? What am I doing?

2005-11-08T19:49:00.000-08:00

My Dear Friends,

It has been two and a half months since my last post. This time has been a revelation to me again of the depth of my vulnerability and has brought me home to a semblance of humility about who I am and my nature in this world. To be human is to develop attachments, to desire and to cling to what is seen as safe and pleasant and to avoid what is seen as fearful or unsafe. I am no different. To change households after 17 years reveals the depth of these attachments, and confronts me with the inevitability of seeing each one. Some are old, and take the form of fears and manifestations of psychological anxiety forms. Some are new and show me my aging and my mortality, and my physical diminishment.

To place oneself in the process of moving, of selling one's home and buying another is to place the control and outcomes in the hands of others. As if I ever really had control over outcomes. Again I am reminded that I can only be with the River of human life, the best I can, and to make my self-offering such that I can be present and swim in the River of Divine Life as it flows through our own. There are moments when you can do nothing, nothing except, Breathe Yeshua. More than ever I know that to live my life is to Breathe Yeshua in this moment and the next, ceaselessly to offer the best of myself in loving kindness and to abide in His Presence ceaselessly, returning home again and again. Yeshua is My home.
With deep bows and ceaseless offering,
Bill Ryan

Yeshua is Coming

2005-08-30T20:32:00.000-07:00

"Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know when the Master of the House will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockrow, or at dawn, or else He may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: 'Keep awake!" Mark 13:35-37

"Yeshua says, I am the Light shining upon all things. I am the sum of everything, for everything has come forth from me, and towards me everything unfolds. Split a piece of wood and there I am. Pick up a stone and you fill find me there." logon 7- Gospel of Thomas

These two scripture readings address the question of our posture toward Christ. Sadly in the religious education of many, the question of this posture is one of loyalty and external affiliation to the correct religious ideology and institution as proof of one's alignment on the "right" side of history when Jesus comes in the second coming or the parousia. For many this is a fear based proposition, a kind of "hedging" of bets or religious life insurance. It presents Jesus as a pathetic authority figure whose sole concern seems to be your unquestioning loyalty rather than the state of your commitment and transformation in the life of love and service. This is the state of conventional religious consciousness.

Here we see two important things. In the first reading Yeshua is the "Master of the house." The house is the self. The Master is the Life that animates the self. To see this from an esoteric and mystical understanding then is to see that we are invited to a state of spiritual attentiveness and receptivity at all times so we will be receptive and open and awakened to Christ's presence within us bursting forth. He is the bridegroom of the soul, the Fire of the Heart or true spirit.

The second reading is much more deliberately focused on the interior life. Here Yeshua's message is clear that the revelation of his true nature depends entirely on the state of our receptivity. Hence real spiritual practice is the cultivation of this receptivity, not by adding anything but an awakened attention to the Light that manifests in all things. When we open to the true essence or Light in each moment of every day life, in animate and inanimate things, we open to the Light of Yeshua's essence. They are the same. Hence the mystics have always said, our true nature is Christ. And the journey of a lifetime is one of Christosis, becoming Christ in all things.

If the praxis of this interior life of communion with Christ were the focus of religious denominations they would cease to be interested in the power and the standing that comes from being an "intermediary" and instead be a companion. They would understand that the "second coming" of Christ is this moment and the next. The true measure of life would then be our capacity for loving kindness in the world rather than the purity of our loyalty to religious institutions and our deference to their ideologies and pretensions of authority.

Many blessings,
Bill Ryan
cmpnwtr@earthlink.net

Being Naked

2005-08-02T15:48:00.000-07:00

"His students asked him. When will you manifest your self to us? How long will it be before we see you as you truly are? Yeshua replied, " On the day you strip yourself naked like those little children and take your clothes off and trample them on the ground under your feet without shame, then you will be able to look upon the son of the Living One without fear." Logon 37- Gospel of Thomas

Friends,

Yeshua uses the metaphor of wearing clothes and being naked to draw our attention to something quite simple but essential in the spiritual life. Persons begin the spiritual journey or a spiritual practice to answer some basic questions in life. Primary among them are "Who are we, where do we come from, where are we going?" If you answer the first question, you answer them all. Yeshua's students are saying, "show us your true nature." Yeshua responds by saying, "you will see my true nature as you uncover your own. They are the same." The Christian mystics say that Christ is our true nature, our true self. The primary paradigm of spiritual development in Eastern Christianity is that of Christosis, the transformation of our soul, our humanity from the inside out, in becoming Christ.

The process of this transformation is one of uncovering, of divestiture of the levels of false identity that we have cultivate in our life. The clothes we wear are the personas we create, the identities we mold in order to find survival and success in life. When we become identified and give our life to these self-creations we commit a life oppressing idolatry and become unable to experience our True Life, our true nature. This divestiture is not a comfortable thing. Often it happens when some support, or some identity we have created is lost or taken from us. Welcomed or not in aging, in sickness, and in death we will be divested and naked. We can throw off our clothes in freedom and joy or be stripped in fear and shame. In the Way of the Heart we learn the freedom of kenosis and releasing our burden of self.

A part of the purpose of taking an extended retreat such as this one, is to "strip' voluntarily from the attachments and the identities that have held one's life together. This is the second time in my life I have voluntarily left my professional career and identity. To leave it brings up an insecure feeling. In a previous extended retreat I had repetitive dreams of being naked in public and trying to hide. Yet here Yeshua is asking us to tread these identities under our feet, these protections from the world, without shame, without trying to hide. This is a new freedom, a new trust that the Life that we are, and the Life that holds us into being, is the Life to which we truly belong and find our home. It is total gift, we can not be undeserving, we can receive it and be glad, and Live this nakeness of our true being in joy. In this joy we recognize Yeshua and we recognize who we are, in our origin and Source, in our manifestation in this transitory life and in our end and new beginning at the end of this life. In the unveiling of the Glory that is Christ we unveil the Glory that abides also within us in our true nature. May we learn to uncover and live this Glory.
Blessings to all,
Bill Ryan
cmpnwtr@earthlink.net

The Way of Remembrance of God

2005-07-26T11:46:00.000-07:00

Friends,

I heard a few years ago what is reportedly a true story. A young couple brought home their new born second child. On the first night at home, they awoke to hear their oldest daughter, now three, approach the crib of the infant in the nursery. She peered into the face of her young brother and said, "Tell me about God, I've almost forgot."

Now this is an endearing story but it speaks a profound and simple truth. The experiential knowledge of God, what the Greeks called "gnosis," and the Hebrews called "da'ath," is what we already possess. In Christianity and in the Semitic mystical origins of Christianity "remembrance" is the essence of all prayer and worship. The word used in the Middle East mystical traditions, whether they be Jewish, Christian, or Islamic, is "Remembrance" or "Anamnesis" (the Greek word). If we possess the knowledge of God in the Heart then there is an understanding that our origin and end is God, God is our Home, always was and always will be in eternity. By inference then the real adversary in our spiritual work is forgetfulness. Forgetfulness of our true nature and our origin and belonging is the source of every spiritual ill in the human condition. To Wake Up!! is then our task in remembering. We are admonished again and again by the Yeshua of scripture to be awake, because the "bridegroom comes." This is falsely understood by some as an apocalyptic reference. Rather it is the practice of 'every moment' unceasing prayer of remembrance, of cultivating spiritual attention and listening to the Heart of Christ beating in our own Heart or Spirit.

To wake up from the unconsciousness of our soul captivated in the ego-mind it is necessary therefore to cultivate a spacious interior silence the ancients called Hesychia. This spacious silence happens as we learn to observe and release from the traffic of the ego-mind and sink into and abide in the interior silence and Presence of the Heart. Prayer of the Heart as a process then, is "observing the mind, abiding in the Heart." In this abiding we began to recognize we are Home, and our inner ear of the Heart is listening more and more to the Heartbeat of the Universe, the Heart of Christ within us. As we listen, we attune our soul, our consciousness, our will to this deep, deep, and Life-giving Heartbeat. Our soul, every aspect of our humanity then becomes an expression of this Inner Heartbeat of Christ. This is Christosis, becoming Christ and we are all the Beloved Disciple with our cheek resting on the breast of Christ. We are Home, and we are remembering who we are, and the Life pouring forth from that Great and Universal Heart that upholds and sustains us.
Many blessings to all,
Bill Ryan
cmpnwtr@earthlink.net

Being on the Way

2005-07-17T16:49:00.000-07:00

Friends,

The early followers of Yeshua were called people of the Way. It's a pity that present day followers don't have the same understanding. In Chinese spiritual tradition the Tao, or the Way, is both the Divine Mystery and the path. In Semitic Eastern Christianity, Christ is both the Divine Mystery manifest in the world, and the Way into that Mystery, the Way we participate in the Mystery.

Inevitably students of mine, as I have done in times past, ask if they shouldn't be having experiences, or noteworthy steps of attainment in the course of their years of practice of Prayer of the Heart. I can only say what I tell myself. There is nothing to be attained, and no separate person to attain it. The goal is the process, participation in the Way. The flow of the Christ Life in our Life is the Way. And we can either unite ourselves in it, in our awakened attention and in our self-offering surrender, or we can resist it, attempt to deny it or flee from it. Clearly having come a certain way, there is only one choice but to say "Yes". Saying Yes is what we can do. We may not be saints, we may not be illumined mystics, but we can continually say "Yes." And quite simply there is nothing else to do.

I awake in the morning. I drink my morning tea and look at the goldfish. They are awake, they are swirling around in their space. As thoughts of the day ahead begin to form, I can return to here and now as I am about to enter my prayer space. Yes, I can do this. I can sit and be present. I can be in Remembrance of the Way, of the appearance of Christ in me, in the world. I can shake off forgetfulness, here and now, and keep returning. This I can do. I can enter the Way, and return, again and again, without ceasing. This is the Great Way of Yeshua. We can do this!
Many blessings on your day,
Bill Ryan
cmpnwtr@earthlink.net

The Edge

2005-07-11T13:55:00.000-07:00

Friends,

A master of the spiritual journey is the African American mystic, Howard Thurman, who was reportedly a spiritual guide to Martin Luther King and many other prophets of our time. In the collection of writings Meditations of the Heart he has a short paragraph reflection called "The Growing Edge." He is speaking about that spatial zone in our life when we are most open to growth. He says, "Look well to the Growing Edge. All around worlds are dying and new worlds are being born..." Life brings change to us, and the path of growth is the open hand, which releases and receives and releases and receives. And it is the moment when there is space that new life can come, especially when we have reached the end of our limits. He states it eloquently this way, "It is the extra breath from the exhausted lung, the one more thing to try when all else has failed, the upward reach of life when weariness closes in upon all endeavor." The retreat experience is an attempt to deliberately place one in this space of the "growing edge.' The spiritual writer, Richard Rohr, calls this "liminal space." Whether a short or a year long retreat, the schedule and the discipline is such to move into liminal space. The hours of formal silent sitting practice are increased, the external sources of social and emotional support are severely limited. The role of being "hermit" wears thin, the romance leaves quickly. There is just you and your practice, nothing to divert you, nothing to excuse you. There is only Breathing Yeshua, nothing else. And one moves into an emptiness that is the liminal space of growth, when what is essential can be revealed. There is no reward system, there is no quid pro quo, the bowing and offering are itself all that is to be found and strangely to our ego-mind it is complete, it is enough. This creates crisis for the ego that continually seeks reward, living in the world of self and other. The numinous world is just ceaseless bowing and ceaseless self-offering. It is its own fulfillment in the flow of Divine Life. To do this and find one's true life is to let Christ live in us.
Many blessings,
Bill Ryan
cmpnwtr@earthlink.net

What you get

2005-06-29T13:03:00.000-07:00

Friends,

Someone asked me as I began this year long retreat what I would get from it. I pondered a moment and said, "Nothing." Now it might appear on the surface that anyone who is setting about for a year's labour, albeit a project of inner work, and expects to get nothing from it, is a candidate for lunacy. This is not the first time my reality orientation might have been questioned. Yet that is the logic of the culture of the world of human society based on separateness and competition. Isn't this what Yeshua spoke of when he challenged us to be "in" the world, but not "of" the world. To live a life rooted in the reality of the Heart, in the Reality of the Christos, is to be in tension with, to be rejected by the world and the values of human society. The Gospel beatitudes tell us that accessibility to the Kingdom of God happens not when we grasp, not when we seek more, but when the grasping fist becomes an open hand, when we cease from taking and craving, but open, release, and offer in love. The limitless life of Yeshua, the Living Spring within us, then becomes possible.

Meister Eckhart says that God doesn't have a choice. When we are ready, God in God's nature must pour God's Self into the space that awaits. So, perhaps I am doing nothing more than making space, space for God to live and breath, space for Yeshua to breathe in me and I to breath Yeshua. This is the Great Way of Christosis, becoming Christ in each moment of consecration. Nothing dramatic, just breathing in and breathing out, in Adoration and Self-offering, in sweeping the floor and cleaning out the house, in cooking the meals, in quiet presence with my wife,Jeanette, in my silent sitting Prayer of the Heart communion with Beloved Yeshua, entering into Christosis. In each breath, in each day, in growing spaciousness. In this I get nothing, I only learn to be more deeply and fully given.
Blessings always,
Bill Ryan
cmpnwtr@earthlink.net

Searching

2005-06-25T22:07:00.000-07:00

Yeshua says: "If you are searching you must not stop until you find. When you find, however, you will become troubled. Your confusion will give way to wonder. In wonder you will reign over all things. Your sovereignty will be your rest." Logion 2- The Gospel of Thomas

In this Coptic Gospel the Wisdom Yeshua presents Himself, His true nature to us and presents the possibility of the Great Way to all. They are the same. Everyone begins by searching. There is the arising of a great desire. The Zen master ancestor, Dogen, calls this the "Mind that Seeks the Way." The author of the Cloud of Unknowing calls this our naked desire, our heart's desire. Doesn't matter, it's innate, it's in all of us. It may remain dormant in some, stifled in others, or given full reign in others. In every case our heart's desire is the way in to the Divine, the way Home. What may be tragic or sad in a life, is that because of despair or confusion, persons either seek cheap substitutes for their heart's desire or give up altogether.

The invitation is to listen to your desire to be Home, to be one with the Unity That Is. In the Christian tradition Yeshua offers Himself as the gate to that essential Unity He calls Abba (loving parent) or Allaha (the Unity from which all things arise.) Yeshua urges us not to stop, for anything, Keep on following this desire, this searching. As we open to it, as we discover the Home that is Christ in our own heart, it can be disturbing, for the very simple reason that our soul, our behavior, our attitudes and values are stunningly out of harmony with this Deeper Life of Christ in our life. Hence the illumination of awakening to oneness is just the beginning. The path then takes us into a lifetime of contrition, conversion, and bringing all of our humanity, all of our soul/consciousness as a lamp of this inner Light of Christ.

Yeshua notes that our confusion subsides as we began to understand that this process of divinization, of continual conversion, of transformation of becoming Christ, is the what we're here to do. The wonder is that there is a Life, the Heart of Christ within us that does reign over all that is our rest and the sovereignty to whom we can give our entire life each moment. This is the meaning of the Consecrated Life.

As time goes on and as I enter this year of retreat, as I do my manual work practice of cleaning out the garage, the closets, the garden shed, the storage room there is some pretty yucky stuff there, mice dung, dirt, and debris of every sort. Well it's a joy to bring some light into these spaces and sweep them clean and bright. This is not unlike the shape we may find our own soul/consciousness. There's yucky stuff in there! Knotted and dark places in need of wholesome Light and space. I shake my head at times, rediscovering with humility what kind of shape I'm actually in. Not a problem, don't judge it as unworthy or unclean. Just sort through it and invite the Light and the spacious healing of the Savior Christ into it. In the same way it is a joy to bring Light and healing and let Christ live in us. That is true living and that is the purpose of our practice, that Christ may live fully in us, in the bosom of our very humanity. As our searching and our wonder grows, the Heart of Christ will reign over all and we will rest and abide in Him as He has welcomed us to do. Our searching begins and ends as we follow the Great Way of the Beloved Disciple, laying our cheek on the breast of Yeshua, listening to the Heartbeart of the Eternal One, Heart of the Universe, Heart of Love, Heart of Compassionate Life.
Yeshua is my home eternally.
Blessings to all,
Bill Ryan
cmpnwtr@earthlink.net

The Big Fish

2005-06-17T20:38:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

Yeshua says: " A true human being can be compared to a wise fisherman who casts his net into the sea and draws it up from below full of small fish. Hidden among them is one large, exceptional fish that he seizes immediately, throwing back all the rest without a second thought. Whoever has ears let them understand this." Logion 8- Gospel of Thomas

We are invited again and again in the canonical Gospels and in this saying from the Gospel of Thomas to live the undivided life. It is the paradox and the tension of human life that what we seek and what brings happiness is simple and uncomplicated, our heart's desire. The Heart as the seat of Essence brings us Home to the Heart of Christ as the ultimate refuge we seek, the ultimate purpose we choose, and the ulimate Love we embrace and give ourselves to. The Heart is the true spirit within us. And yet we were also given a mind to engage with the incarnate, ever transitory and shifting nature of the created world. We were given a mind that weaves and creates a sense of self, a self of separateness to defend and enhance. In imagination the mind loses connection with Home and creates new illusory worlds to seek, to possess, and to conquer for itself. It creates an opposition to other beings and builds a world unto itself, a small illusory circle apart from and isolated from the universal circle that is the Heart of Christ.

In this text Yeshua is not giving us some prescription or formula for self improvement, nor is he setting up an ideal for us to live up to, rather He is inviting us to do something that we most want to do anyway, to give our life, to be utterly, completely, passionately, and wholly consumed, wholly given, to our deepest longing in life. It is that simple, but not that easy.

Why are we here? Why do we lead a life of Faith, what is a longing that takes us into spiritual practice? The Hasidic Master, the Baal Shem Tov of 18th century Ukraine asserted, "Let us fall wholly into the hands of God, so that we do not fall into the hands of men." Without the consecrated life, without the total gift of self in love in the heart of Christ we are prey to be possessed by the culture which surrounds us.

A tragedy of our religious education can be that it does not open us to the miracle of Emmanuel, God with us, God within us. That the answers to our life of seeking are "out there" rather than at the heart of our own heart, the true spirit within us, the tabernacle, the holy of Holies of Christ's life and presence within us.

Throughout my journey my prayer has been, "Show me, Beloved, what I can give my life to completely and without reservation," as if there were a something outside of God that would bring this completion. And the response has always been, "let go, let go, let go.. and I am Here, and Now always offering Myself to you, He whispers to me, I am the One you can give your life to unreservedly. I will give you a place to rest your soul. Come to me and drink."

When we peel away everything else, and let go of all those damn little fishes we hold on to, the Big Fish is there, and has been all along, Offering Himself to us from the beginning. This is why we do the prayer of kenosis, to let go of all those little fishes, so we can empty of this hungry mind-seeking, and rest in the Heart where God waits for us eternally, "in this nakedness, (where all has been stripped away and given over to our Divine Beloved) does the soul find its true rest," as John of the Cross speaks.

The message of Yeshua in the Wisdom text of Thomas is clear. In order to fully receive the Big fish those little ones have got to be tossed back into the sea. The message of the Shema' (The Great Commandment) is clear, we must be given in entirety, no holding back. So here I am, in this year of retreat, clearing a sanctuary space so I can sink into, rest in my Deepest Longing for Communion with Christ, the Big Fish, and toss those little fish of misdirections and dead end. Since, I, like you deeply desire to be given and be utterly aflame, utterly consumed in this participation in the Fire of the Universal ShemaÂ’ that encompasses all things. This is the Big Fish, the Heart of God, who is Christ, in Whom the whole the universe and you and me have come into being.

So this year in my formal times of sitting practice of inner communion with Christ and in every moment, every breath, I want to keep coming back to searching deeply within and give myself again and again to the Presence of Adoration and to the utter Self giving of my love to the One who beckons me. I want to sink into Him and find my only and true Refuge, as He says, "Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy burdened, and I will give you a place to rest your soul."

Peace and blessings to all,
Bill Ryan
cmpnwtr@earthink.net

Making a Promise

2005-06-12T20:38:00.000-07:00

Friends,
Today I stood before the faith community of Sts. Peter and Paul parish. And I made a promise. It was a vow, stated before others. When vows are stated before others they take on added gravity. I have deliberately put myself on notice before others that I'm making a covenant with the Beloved Yeshua. I wanted to make this more than a private promise. Private promises can more easily be finessed or fudged. I don't want that. If I fall short, I want to face that. I also recognize that the support of my companions on the journey is welcomed and received, and needed.

When couples marry before others, they do so to make a covenant with each other, and with the Divine, but also with the community. We make covenants and take vows of spiritual practice, not for ourselves only, but for the good of all beings. All of us together are waking up together to a life of communion with the Beloved, the Life that is our life. And for Christians we recognize and find refuge in that One Life in our communion with Yeshua.

In approaching the altar I began with a chant from the Benedictine tradition, the Suscipe me, translated today by my Benedictine friends as "Receive me, O Lord, that I may live." I am saying to the Lord, Your Life is my true life, bring me into Oneness with You." I began the chant at the base of the aisle in Gregorian mode, and stopped half way to the altar, chanted again, and again a third time at the steps ascending to the chauncel area before the altar. There I knelt and responded to my rector, Kurt Neilsen , assisted by Mary, the subdeacon. I looked into their eyes and felt their warmth and their blessing. That was enough. He asked me, "What do you seek?" I replied, "I wish to be consecrated to the Lord Jesus Christ." That was enough, and all else was elaboration, but necessary elaboration. And I stated my vows and commitment to a daily rule of life. The structure and weave of the daily life of vow-keeping. I handed my vows to Kurt and he placed them on the altar and crossed me in blessing and I crossed myself, receiving his blessing, promising to face the darkness and bring it to healing in Yeshua.

I shook Kurt's hand and Mary's in giving the sign of Christ's peace. As I turned I felt the warmth and blessing of those present and went to each and receive their hand in exchange of peace. After the service, as it was " blue jeans Sunday" we all went outside and weeded and cleaned up the grounds in service and work practice given to the community. This I shall do every Thurs. to help me remember what I do in silence and in solitude I do not do alone, but ever in the communion of Christ in this sacred circle. Yet I know that every sacred circle in our lives is only one manifestation of the universal circle of the Heart of Christ that encompasses all beings, all Creation.

Thank you all for your blessing and your prayerful support as I begin my hermitage journey on Wed. June. 15

Bill Ryan - June 12, 2005
cmpwtr@earthlink.net

Breathing Yeshua

2005-05-15T19:00:00.000-07:00

Human life is breathing in and breathing out, emptying and offering, receiving and bowing. Whether Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Native religion, we all do this. The Divine Beloved pours Herself out into life, into beings, and they pour themselves into the Divine Beloved. To do this conscously and intentionally is the inner work of spiritual practice. Yeshua, the Christ, came to show us this. And He is the Life and Gift of God poured out into us and the world. He offers Himself eternally to live and breathe in us. The Kingdom of God is within and without, and we can enter and abide.
Welcome to this diary of reflections on the journey!

Bill Ryan- www.prayeroftheheart.com