Our True Refuge

Our True Refuge

"Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the Vine and you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit." John 15:4

Throughout Christianity in the East and West there is a recurring theme in religious iconography of the Heart of Christ presented with the hand pointing to the heart or divine Fire arising from the Heart of Christ. This symbolism points to the centrality of the heart in Christianity. Even more important is the insight proclaimed that the Heart of the Universal Risen Christ is the refuge, home, and locus of our life's completion. For the seeker this insight becomes the core of the journey in the Way of the Heart.

For those on this journey the questions we must continually ask ourselves in each moment of life is, "Where is our true Refuge?" To what do we give our life, unreservedly and without question? What is the hub around which the wheel of our life turns, the center of gravity where our life is anchored?" St. Benedict teaches us in his timeless monastic Rule that the center of life and the core wisdom of spiritual praxis is this: "Prefer nothing to Christ."

Salvation is correctly understood as healing, as an annointing salve or balm of the soul. This spiritual healing happens when our human life and consciousness is realigned, re-ordered around the Essence of our life, rather than the peripheral and all too deluded consciousness of our ego-minds. Our human journey is one of going from "dis-membering" to  "re-membering." Re-membering is to recover what was lost or make whole what was separate. Hence in the Middle East the practice of contemplation has often been named the "Re-membrance of God."

Conditioned and Unconditioned Life

 In the Gospel of Thomas (logion 7) Yeshua says, " A lion eaten by a human being is blessed as it changes to human form, but a human being devoured by a lion is cursed as a human becomes lion." Our life's transformation turns on the choice between having our humanity infused and alive in the Heart of Christ or consumed and overwhelmed by the inclinations of the ego-mind and our instinctual life. Therefore the real journey is the divinization of our humanity with its biological instincts, and consciousness. Through grace the earthen clay of our humanity can become servant of the spiritual center or Heart, and therefore sacred vessel of the Living God's own life, the Body of Christ.  The Limitless Unconditioned Life of Christ is our True Life. We were born to live His Life in ours.

As we go through life eventually we begin to understand that there are some things in life that just don't last. Impermanence is linked to every aspect of our incarnate lives. And yet in the Gospels Yeshua asks us to go beyond the impermanent appearances of things. We walk in two worlds, the world of conditioned impermanent life and loss, and the world of spirit and the Divine Eternal.  He warns us, (paraphrase) "Don't put great value in what moth and worm can destroy.  Look for the pearl of great price, and put your trust in what endures, give up everything else if you really want to give yourself to Me. If you want to find your Life, you must lose the life of illusion."  The habit patterns of a lifetime must be relinquished. We must find freedom and detachment with even the most treasured of our familial relationships. Yeshua invites us to find our home and full refuge in That which does not fail, His Own Heart.

The ego-mind sees all this detachment as diminishment and loss.  The Heart sees it as freedom, as finding our way Home. To choose Refuge in the Heart of Christ is to find our Home, our True Identity, who we truly are.  For as Paul says in Colossians (2:9-10)" It is in Christ that the complete being of the Godhead dwells embodied and in Him you have been brought to completion."

Salvation Practice

One way of understanding the process of salvation in our lives is to continually ask ourselves in every life dilemma, in every choice we make, in every moment, 'Where is our true Refuge? In what are we seeking safety, fulfillment, and completion?' This is not always easy to know, as the ego-mind is so skillful at co-opting even our most sincere intentions.

The practice of Christian Meditation, or Prayer of the Heart, therefore, is the practice of continually seeking refuge in the Heart of Christ. Christian theologians have stated that salvation is the process of conforming our individual will to the will of God.

Mystical Christianity has understood salvation to be the full surrender of the self to God in a process of "uniting our human life and consciousness with Divine Life and Consciousness." We can define this process of surrender as finding our true Home and Refuge in the One Life of our belonging, and learning that every other refuge, really isn't a refuge.  We need no longer "look for love in all the wrong places."

One of the metaphors Yeshua gives to us in the Gospel is the story of the prodigal child. This wonderful story of limitless love and mercy depicts the theme of leaving home and finding home. The story takes us into the human cycle of dissipation of Essence and being restored to Essence. We are brought into the universal human journey of lostness, separateness, estrangement, and the journey home to rediscover and abide in the true Parentage and the Home of our true belonging. To find our true refuge is to come home to the Heart of Christ again and again. In Breathing Yeshua this is what we actualize.

Salvation practice is the practice of the singular commandment of Yeshua who says that everything in the tradition, in the law, and in the prophets is to be found in the Love of God and neighbor. We find our capacity for divine Love in the Heart of Christ. Yeshua says that this great commandment is the only commandment, seeking any kind of completion in life outside of the Love of God is only a blind alley and results in our experience of being lost and isolated.  The Cistercian monk and mystic writer Thomas Merton said similarly that there is only one commandment. All the other commandments are just elaborations; therefore all sins are a form of idolatry, of seeking outside of God what God alone can give. God alone is our refuge and Source of completion.

The core of the Christian Mystery is that we have a doorway, an entrance into the Heart of God. Christ is the revelation of the Heart of God and the doorway in. In the person of Yeshua God becomes fully accessible to us; and in our refuge in the universal Heart of Christ we become accessible and divinized in the God of Mystery. This God of Mystery, the Life of Allaha, the Essential Unity from Whom all things arise flows through us as the life-giving blood in our veins.

Leaping into the Great Circle of the Heart of Christ-

For Christians this process of divinization happens in a life consecrated in Christ. Through our devotional love for the personal Yeshua we enter into the universal Christ who is the Great Circle of our belonging in our practice of Refuge in the Heart of Christ. As we find our refuge and belonging in Him, we are, in the words of Paul- "… one person in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28) We are the One person" in whom all things are made, and all things have their being."  (John 1:3)

To take refuge in the Heart of Christ is an actualization of this Mystery in every difficult circumstance in Life. And is it not in crisis, when the ground is shifting, when our established patterns no longer work, that we make those leaps of Refuge in His Heart? Fear arises and we can do nothing about that. We can find a way to be with fear, so that it doesn't control us, so that we can choose our true refuge in the middle of fear. These are the true moments of conversion and opening. In that moment of choice when we take refuge we become servant and companion with the Eternal One in our own Hearts, within and among us." Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, will my servant be." (John 12:26)

Meeting the every day dilemmas of life with our practice of Refuge in the Heart of -Christ takes us from the life of limits and conditions and impermanence into Limitless Life. Such a moment came in my work one day as a geriatric mental health clinician when I was called to consult in the case of a woman in a nursing home who was rapidly declining from depression. When I arrived she was already dying from onset of pneumonia. There was nothing I could do as a professional, and there was nothing anyone could do at this stage to prevent her death. I reached for the Limitless in that situation and asked her if she was afraid. She said "yes," and I took her hand and talked with her for while.  I prayed with her and in my interior prayer offered my own communion with the Heart of Christ to this woman. I had nothing to give but the quality of my presence and practice of refuge in the love and Heart of Christ.  And it was enough; it was sufficient.

The practice of Refuge in the Heart of Christ comes with meeting the every day dilemmas of life, releasing from the mind's compulsion for control and being given to the Heart's willingness to love. That is the ground of our transformation, those are the moments of our conversion. Such dilemmas happen when:

We risk disapproval and rejection for the sake of truth.

We risk emotional insecurity and safety for the sake of love and compassion.

We risk temporal security in things for the greater security of belonging in Christ.

We challenge the culture and risk attack and persecution around us for the sake of the integrity of Christ's Love.

 In such moments our own thoughts and emotions will fail us. If we take our refuge in the mental and emotional patterns of a lifetime, they will fail us and draw us back into the same dead ends. We will remain trapped in our habitual patterns of fear and illusions of control. Such a moment came for me when I held the body of my dead child when he died from Leukemia, and the opening to leap into the Limitless was given me. The limit of death for us is often the greatest limit. To take refuge in the Limitless Heart of Christ in such a moment is our sole refuge.

In such moments we are called to lay down our life of refuge in pleasant feelings and the addictive patterns and behaviors which feed them. We lay down the compulsion to re-create them again and again where they lead us, far from finding true security and fullness.

In such moments our self defense patterns and protective mechanisms will lead us to react in ways that may create harm or injury, or at best greater rationalizations of our habitual patterns. And we are called into the new life of forgiveness and open handed offering.  We release into the freedom of the present moment where our humanity is offered in love to the One who is Limitless Life.

In those moments fears arise and our only strength is the rootedness of our Praxis of Refuge in the Heart of Christ. We learn to ride out the fear.  Like Yeshua we may say, "Let this cup pass" but let our prayer be "my sole Refuge is Your Heart O Christ." In those moments the strength of our consecrated presence and self-offering, our practice of Refuge in the Heart of Christ, is our anchor and carries us through the emotional storms of anger or fear, and He quiets the storm, saying "Fear not."

In all of this we are never alone, never abandoned. Yeshua makes us this promise:

"Yet I am not alone because the Father is with me. I have said this to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have overcome the world." John 16:32 Yeshua, the Christ, who is unconditional Life and Love, has overcome all conditions and His Heart is our Refuge.

Even as we confront death, our death or the death of our loved ones, in our Refuge in the Heart of the Deathless One we touch Eternity, and Eternity touches us, We come home to Eternal Life as our True Life, a Life that is indestructible, deathless, unchanging. This is the Life that Yeshua came to give us His very own Life, His very Own Heart. "I came that they should have Life, and have it abundantly." (John 10:10

He shares his Life of Love with us without reservation: "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept the Father's commandments and abide in His love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete." (John 15:9-11)

Our sole and essential commandment from Yeshua  is to take refuge, to abide ever in His Love. This is the ceaseless practice of Prayer of the Heart.

Brother Roger of Taize speaks of our act of commitment, our consecrated "Yes" to Christ in this way:

"One day you understood this, that without your being aware of it, a yes had already been inscribed in your innermost depths. And so you chose to go forward in the footsteps of Christ, a choice no one can make for another. In silence and in the presence of Christ, you hard Him say, "Come, follow me: I will give you a place to rest your heart.

And so you are led to that audacity of a yes that lasts until your dying breath."

( Brother Roger, p.46)

Our Yes to Christ

Our "Yes" to Christ comes when we drop the little circle of our prisons of separateness and leap into the universal circle that is the Heart of Christ. An important leap for me occurred on the occasion of the crisis of the terminal illness of my infant son. In August 1980 I found myself walking the corridor of the Dohrenbecher pediatric unit of Oregon Health Sciences Center. My son had been diagnosed with acute myelocytic leukemia and he had been started on aggressive chemotherapy that was quickly poisoning his little one year old body. I pulled a small red wagon behind me where he sat upright with an IV bottle attached running the chemotherapy poison into the arm I had held and kissed so many times. In a state of mental torment my mind flooded with a thousand crazy thoughts stirring anger and fear. A fantasy gripped me of scooping up my beloved little boy and running out of the hospital to Mexico where he could be treated and cured without torture, and with a hope this doctor and this hospital didn't offer. The oncologists cold voice still cut like a knife, promising no more than a couple of "good" years if my boy went into remission.

Every evening after dinner at this time, a caravan of young children with terminal illness trooped around and around. In defiance of their condition they pedaled tricycles, pulled wagons, and little toys on strings. I was in that caravan and fighting it, telling myself again and again, "My boy, Carlo, isn't one of them. He's not going to die." The inner struggle reached a point of paralyzed tension and I pulled the wagon over to an alcove in the corridor. I was in torment.  Sinking into my meditation practice to find a whisper of quiet and peace, I heard the Beloved's voice.  He said, "Look into his eyes."  I turned to look into my beloved son's eyes. They were very clear and peaceful. They spoke a simple and clear question, " Will you walk with me through this, or are you going to run away from it?" There are a millions ways to run away.

The whole question was made clear and the answer was a resounding "yes." There was nothing I could do to save my son from death. But I could choose to walk with him and love him the best I could. To avoid and resist the fact of his illness and probable death would be abandonment. To love is to hurt; to love is to be in the fullness of Life.  A joy beyond description rose up in me and I knew nothing could take this "yes" from me. I rejoined the circle of ill and dying children and knew Carlo and I were and always will be in that circle of children. It is the circle of the Heart of Christ and we can leap there with every step in this life. The Heart of Christ is the Heart of God, is the Heart of the Universe. There is our home and belonging.

Heart of Christ- Heart of All Existence

When we leap into this Circle, we awaken to the Mystery of Existence, "God so loved the world that he gave his Only Begotten Son."(John 3:16) The truth of Christ as God's gift of His own Self to us becomes true.  The Living Word does truly become Flesh and dwells among and within us.  The Allaha, Source of All, pours out Its own Essence of Self-Giving Love in Christ to us. From this Source we are loved into existence. In becoming conscious creation in the Heart of Christ the Redeemer, in the Spirit, we become gift and self-offering to enter the Mystery of the Abba who has birthed us and receives us home Unto Himself. This is the Trinitarian Mystery of Love, the Circle that encompasses all Circles.

Isaiah 55:10- “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my Word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it."

In loving Yeshua we become fully whole and human in form and flesh; in the Heart of Christ we open to the oceanic and universal Heart of Being Itself who transcends all form and substance. This is the rhythm of the cataphatic and apophatic, form and formlessness, in the spiritual journey of each day. We are all the Word of God in Christ.

Celtic Christianity has offered us a resolution of the dualism that has pervaded so much of the Christian world. The Celtic Christians in the time of their development independent from the Roman church drew on indigenous mysticism and folk wisdom. They understood clearly that the Christ of history and scripture is also the Christ of their hearts, the Christ that is the Light of all Creation before Creation came into being. "The Christ who is with His people in the quiet of the windless sea, is with them in the midst of the wild wintry storm. The Christ who is within, at the center of their spirit, is the Christ who is to be looked for in friend and stranger, Christ at the heart of all life." (Newell, p. 26)  In Celtic Christianity therefore we not only believe that Christ is the Light of the world in some abstract sense but that true salvation and spiritual path in the words of Celtic theologian, John Scotus Eriugena, is "the true beholding of the Light from the inner eyes." (Newell, p. 37) This vision of the universal and personal Christ as Heart and Light of the world, is articulated further in the scientific mind and mystical vision of the Jesuit philosopher and anthropologist, Pierre Teihard de Chardin. De Chardin sees a universe moving toward an Omega point where the fullness of the Light of Christ is manifested in all incarnate creation. This cosmic, universal Christ De Chardin proclaims, is the true pantocrator (ruler of the universe) depicted in the icons of Eastern Christianity (see cover of this book). "Glorious Lord Christ, the divine influence secretly diffused and active in the depths of matter, and the dazzling center, where all the innumerable fibers of the multiple meet; power as implacable as the world and as warm as life; You whose forehead is of the whiteness of snow, whose eyes are of fire, and whose feet are brighter than molten gold; you whose hands imprison the stars; You who are the first and the last, the living and the dead and the risen again; You who gather into your exuberant Unity every beauty, every affinity, every energy, every mode of existence; it is You to whom my being cried out with a desire as vast as the universe, 'In truth you are my Lord and my God.' " (De Chardin, p. 132)

Dissolving into the Heart of Christ

In 1987 I received a teaching that I will only attempt to live for the remainder of my days. On one of those occasions of exasperation that nearly everyone encounters on the journey I asked a question in prayer, pointed in the Divine's direction, yet hardly expecting an answer: " Oh, what's the matter with my life anyway?" The answer came in the form of a vision and an experience. The first part was vision: I found myself walking along a long dirt road. There were countless numbers of persons walking alone or together on this road. I found myself walking behind three companions. The middle one stopped and turned to face me. He was Yeshua. His eyes of compassion pierced me through and through and He reached to touch me in the heart. He leaned forward and whispered to me, "There's an empty place here, Bill." At His touch a lightning bolt surged through me and the vision changed to formless, imageless, unmediated experience. The "I" of Bill, dissolved into the Heart of Christ, and in this dissolution came a union with the Heart of Christ within all things, "the One in whom all things came into being."

 It is hard to know whether any time lapsed. When the "I" of Bill came back to awareness, there was just astonishment and joy. In the years that have passed I have come to realize, knowing or not, we are all on the road to Emmaus. The One we seek is the One who walks with us. We recognize Him in the burning of our hearts, and the ancient practice of Breathing Yeshua, in the ceaseless bowing and ceaseless offering of ourselves to Him in love.

Beloved Yeshua, You are My Heart's Desire, I take refuge only and always in Your Heart."

In the Way of the Heart the universal and oceanic Heart of Christ is our heart's desire and true refuge and encompasses all of existence.

Col. 1:15 “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all Creation; for in Him all things in Heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible… All things have been created through Him and for Him. He Himself is before all things and in Him all things hold together.”


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References

1.     Ryan, William. The Beloved is My Refuge- A Guide to Consecrated Life in Prayer of the Heart. Lake Oswego, Oregon: Avalon Counseling, 2003

2.     Brother Roger of Taize, No Greater Love. Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press

3.     De Chardin, Pierre Teilhard. The Heart of the Matter. San Diego: Harvest/HJB Books, 1978

4.     Freeman, Laurence, Jesus, the Teacher Within, New York: Continuum Publishing

5.     Hall, Thelma, Too Deep for Words: Rediscovering Lectio Divina. Paulist Press

6.     (ed.) Hirshfield, Jane.Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women. New York: Harper/Collins Publishing, 1994

7.     Jager, Willigis. Contemplation-A Christian Path. Missouri: Liguori,1994

8.     Kadloubovsky and Palmer. Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart. Chatham/Kent: MacKays of Chatham, 1992

9.     Kelly, Thomas. A Testament of Devotion. San Francisco: Harper Publishing, 1969

10.  Main, John. The Heart of Creation. New York, New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1989

11.  Main, John. Moment of Christ- the Path of Meditation, New York: Continuum Publishing, 1999

12.  Mitchell, Stephen. The Enlightened Mind-An Anthology of Sacred Prose. New York: Harper/Collins, 1991

13.  Mitchell, Stephen. The Enlightened Heart-An Anthology of Sacred Poetry. New York: Harper/Collins, 1991

14.  Merton, Thomas. Contemplative Prayer. New York: Image Books,1996

15.  Newell, Philip. Listening for the Heartbeat of God. New York/ Mahwah N.J.: Paulist Press, 1997

16.  Ponticus, Evagrius. The Pratikos and Chapters on Prayer. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications,1981

17.  Taylor, Brian. Becoming Christ- Transformation Through Contemplation, Cambridge, Mass: Cowley Publications, 2002

18.  Thompson, Marjorie J. Soul Feast- An Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995

Ware, Kallistos. The Inner Kingdom(Vol. 1- The Collected Works). Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2000

Consecration to the Heart of Christ in Daily Practice

Consecration to the Heart of Christ

in Daily Practice-

The Christification of our Lives: A central theme of Eastern Christianity is that the life's journey is the divinization of our humanity in Christ. The Praxis of Prayer of the Heart is the actualization of this mystery.  Essential to this process is the way we consecrate the space, the activity, and the motivation of our daily human life.  We liturgically celebrate this consecration and Christification of our humanity in the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, in sacred time and space we liturgically enact at the altar and Eucharistic table, the movements of the self-offering of our humanity in Christ, and the receiving of the Self-Offering of Divine Life in Christ.

Consecration of Time: To consecrate time is to make it holy, to set it aside as sacred offering. On a practice level, this means we set aside, or consecrate, time at intervals in the day to give ourselves to formal practice. For most this means the time in the early morning, just after rising, before the activities and responsibilities of the day began to ask our attention. At this early hour we give our first attention and responsibility to the vertical relationship with God alone, in solitude, silence, and interiority. This consecrated time of refuge in the Heart of Christ in interior silence and communion is the pivot point for daily life.

It is recommended in the early morning we set aside at least a half hour of silent sitting prayer of the heart time in addition to the devotional, intercessory, and lectio divina prayer we may practice. A similar amount of time in the evening is recommended. For some an evening prayer session may be difficult because of the demands of family. In that event it is recommended that two periods of sitting practice be integrated in one's life in the morning time.

Consecration of Space: In our homes too often we provide space only for what we regard as utilitarian purposes or the habit patterns and cultivated distraction of our lives. It is a vital necessity in the spiritual life to set aside space that is dedicated to the life of inner communion with Christ.  The qualities of this space are quiet, reverence, and symbols which hold the Heart of Christ ever before us as our refuge and home. 

In our sacred space the placement of an altar is recommended. In the mystical Christian tradition the altar as symbolic and liturgical point of contact between human and Divine is a primary way of establishing sacred space. The altar is also the symbol in Judeo-Christian tradition of the Eternal wedding feast of union between God and Creation.  In the Prayer of the Heart practice many people place icons or symbols of Christ on the altar, to help us connect with our purpose and motivations for entering sacred space.  There are many powerful versions of the icon of Christ Pantocrator, which symbolically point to the Heart of Christ and Mind of Christ in the Torah or sacred scripture. For some a Christ candle or light, representing the Light of Christ in our own Heart is also a central expression of our interiority of communion in Christ. This sanctuary of sacred space, where we reverence with silence, respect, and devotional expressions of bowing and respect, becomes our daily space of encounter and renewal of the practice of refuge in the Heart of Christ.

Consecration of Intention: Many motivations can be heard in this culture for undertaking contemplation or meditative prayer. In the Prayer of the Heart practice there is only one motivation, to be fully united and given in love to God in all things.  This motivation is already present within us. It can remain unrealized and unlived, however, unless we continually consecrate our motivation in our practice. We renew our motivation daily in prayerful expression and, as we purify our will, to be wholly given to our singular desire to be one with God in all things. This is the actualization of the Great Commandment of love. Yeshua invites us to love God with our whole, undivided humanity.

 A short prayer of consecration to be invoked at the beginning of our silent sitting prayer time can assist in this purpose.  In this prayer of consecration we connect our consciousness and will with the deeper "willingness" of the Heart. Each time we recite it in sincerity of purpose we are making an ever-deepening commitment to give ourselves over in entirety to the Love of God.  We enact the deep willingness and desire of our outstretched hands that continually bow, open, and offer, and cling to nothing.

Some examples of a prayer of consecration of intention might be: "Lord Yeshua, I give myself to You." "O Beloved Yeshua, I take refuge in You alone."  It is helpful for us to find the language that best expresses this inner intention in a personal way. This may require some listening and attunement, trying on language that fits for each person.  This prayer of consecration may not only be invoked at the beginning of our prayer period each time, but also at intervals during the day when we need to "bring ourselves back".  It is recommended to habitually bring the prayer word as a continual and ongoing anchor throughout all activity in my life. But at intervals in the day, one may take a short pause or breather, settling in deep breathing, and invoke the prayer of consecration.

Another form of consecration of Intention is a daily recitation of a "Vow of Practice." This is recited at the end of the first prayer period of the day. An example of a "Vow of Practice" might be: "O Beloved Yeshua, this day I vow to love you in all things." "Heart of Christ, this day I vow to take refuge always in you." "O Beloved, I will love you in all my being, in all my doing. I will love my neighbor as myself." This vow of practice then becomes the basis of our recollection at the end of the day. The inner desire and willingness, to offer ourselves, our humanity, to be wholly united in love with the Self-Giving Life of Christ in us, is at the root of our own Christification.

In this way in ceaseless Prayer of the Heart I participate in the receiving and offering of Divine Life which is at the heart of existence. In  "Breathing Yeshua" I open myself to the divinization or Christification of my humanity. I receive the gift of God, who is Christ, into my own humanity, and I offer in love the totality of my human life in Christ to the Abba, the Source of Life. Participation then in Divine Life, the Living Water of the Life of Christ, is one continual flow of endless bowing in adoration, endless offering in love.

The Practice of Divine Reading-Lectio Divina

The Practice of Divine Reading- Lectio Divina

“Yeshua Christ, the Word which came out of Silence.” - St. Ignatius of Antioch

“God spoke one Word in silence from all eternity and He spoke it in

silence, and it is in silence that we hear It." –John of the Cross

                 

Lectio Divina and Prayer of the Heart- The transformation of one’s life may be seen as the transition from living life from the mind, the thoughts, the emotions and the instincts to living life fully from the Heart, the Center of our being, the place of the Indwelling God. In the Heart Christ can come fully alive in us, so that “I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me.” (Gal. 2:20) Lectio Divina is the formalized movement from the mind and conceptual reflection on scripture to listening and experiencing the Presence of Christ in the Heart.

There are four interior movements of Lectio Divina or Divine Reading:

1. Reading-(Lectio)- We begin by choosing a scriptural text. The choice is an intuitive one, or it may be the lectionary readings for the day or week. We read the text slowly to ourselves, listening carefully to each work. At this level we listen deeply to the written word of God, listening to those words or phrases in the reading that seem to speak to us in a special way. This is a receptive way of reading and listening, open to receive, as the parable of the seed falling on fertile ground.

2. Reflecting (meditatio)- We read the scriptural text again a second time. In this movement we are listening to an interior reflection to the word or phrase which speaks to us. How is it touching us within? We are listening receptively rather than analyzing or interpreting, asking the question, in what way God touching us, speaking to us about our own life. It is important to remember that this is not Bible study or objective interpretation, or a theological study, but a personal reflection to the Living Word of God speaking to us through the written word.  It is a deeper movement toward listening and pondering in our interior life.

3. Responding (oratio)- We listen again a third time to the scriptural text as it speaks to us.  This time in the third movement of Lectio we allow a spontaneous prayer to arise in response to the listening and reflecting. How do we open in our desire in response God’s word? How do we open in our longing for the Living Word of God, Christ, to flame up within us? In what way do we respond to the call to be transformed in God’s Love? What are the inner responses of praise, gratitude, contrition, or new commitment?  We may express this response in words and in human emotion and verbal prayer.

4. Resting in God (contemplatio) We listen again to the words of the text, moving into interior silence and communion. This is a movement into intimacy beyond words and concepts. This is a movement into pure Faith or Trust. Here we rest in the Heart of Christ alone and seek no other thing. Here we anchor in the Heart, in the Center of our being, where the living Spirit of Christ dwells. We move beyond the mediation of words and thoughts, into pure Presence and Adoration, into pure self-giving Love. This longing, this desire, this commitment to take refuge, to rest in Love of Christ alone, rather than our own thoughts, emotions, agendas, and inclinations, is the movement into pure Prayer of the Heart or contemplation. Through this process of Lectio Divina, or Divine Reading/Listening, the textual Word of God has been the bridge to abiding in Christ, the Living Word of God in our own heart.

Integration of Prayer of the Heart in a Rule of Life

 Integration of Prayer of the Heart in a Rule of Life

To unify our life utterly with Christ we must make commitments that are incarnated in daily praxis or actualization. In other words it isn't enough to have lovely thoughts or intentions about our life of Refuge in the Heart of Christ.  We must **do** something to deepen our daily gift of self in love to the Beloved Yeshua. This is especially true for those who follow the Way of the Heart. The most sublime illumination or unitive experiences can become only pleasant memories if we do not consecrate our life and commitment, moment to moment, to the living Truth of those experiences.  This consecrated life takes expression in making every act of attention one of adoration of Christ in the present moment and every choice one of self-giving love to Christ. St. Benedict in his Rule says "Prefer nothing to Christ." We must make each moment of life in the Prayer of the Heart a choice for singular Refuge in the Heart of Christ. Yeshua must be our breath, Yeshua must be our life, and Yeshua must become in the course of a lifetime our home and sole refuge. From the monastic tradition we solemnize and incarnate this commitment in a personal Rule of Life.

What is a Rule of Life? - Marjorie Thompson, in her book on Christian Spiritual Disciplines, Soul Feast, says: “ A rule of life is a pattern of spiritual disciplines which provides structure and direction for growth in holiness. When we speak of patterns in our life, we mean attitudes, behaviors, or elements that are routine, regular, repeated.  .... It is meant to help us establish a rhythm of daily living, a basic order within which new freedoms can grow. A rule of life, like a trellis, curbs our tendency to wander and supports our frail efforts to grow spiritually.” (Thompson. p.138)

Why do we need a Rule of Life? -  The spiritual journey in Prayer of the Heart starts with the insight that Christ alone is our heart’s desire, and it is only when communion with Yeshua is the wellspring of every action, every choice, and every goal, that we find completion and essential happiness and peace in life.  At the same time the Prayer of the Heart tradition acknowledges the tremendous resistance in the ego-self to the life of transformation. Life long conversion takes us from private self seeking and the impulses of our misdirected desires, to bringing Christ at the center of all we do, "To prefer nothing to Christ."  Spiritual maturation therefore requires commitment, and commitment requires discipline, the capacity and willingness to be faithful, moment to moment, and day by day, to our practices of relational life and refuge in Christ. This goal of growing intimacy and realization that for us Christ is both personal and oceanic presence of the Divine Beloved, is to be realized through the life of ceaseless Prayer of the Heart, in all things, in all moments of life. The Rule of Life is a commitment to ceaseless prayer, ceaseless communion in Christ.

 

Our Personal Covenant with Christ  in the Way of the Heart

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 can be restful and restoring, but its essence is our self-giving to Christ. We keep watch with Christ and wait on His Presence, and open to His love. We breathe Yeshua and it is enough.

Consecrated Reading and Reflection- We need to also give time to reading and reflecting about the Christ who is our heart’s desire. The practice of Lectio Divina comes to us from the ancients as a way of moving from the textual word of God with the mind to the Living Word of Christ in interior silence. We should make of this a Holy Leisure, which is both restoring and enriching.

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 and recollection each day.  This is usually best done in the evening at prayer time in conjunction with our evening Prayer of the Heart session. We do this not to judge or condemn or deem any part of our humanity unworthy. Rather we do this so that we can be willing to look honestly and nakedly at all those elements in our life, in our mental activity, in our actions, in our ethics, in our inner and outer life, which are not in harmony with interior communion with God. We stand naked and hold before the merciful eyes of Christ all of our humanity, all of the dark places in our mind and consciousness that need His love and truth to be healed. We look closely for those aspects of our daily life that lead us from our deepest intention of refuge in Christ or worse, bring injury to our intimacy with Him. This daily practice brings the utter freedom of contrition, forgiveness, and release from all that impedes the love of Christ in our life. In Yeshua the grace of conversion is always being offered. We can only make ourselves accessible to it.

 Consecrated Service/Work- The praxis of our love of Yeshua extends to all of our community, to all beings, to all Creation, to love and serve Christ 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, caring for our families, ministering to the sick, or cleaning up the polluted waterways in our community. In consecrated work practice we bring the fullness of our presence to the service before us, and do all we do as offering to the love of Christ. We do consecrated work practice in the great tradition of Brother Lawrence and the practice of the Presence of God, and in the Benedictine monastic rule of prayer in work. This service is the praxis of Ceaseless Prayer of the Heart in the service of Christ in all Creation.

Community Prayer and Liturgical Practice- We do not come to God alone. "Where two or three are gathered" in Yeshua we find Him there. This may be more readily attainable for some than others. We may need to be creative and flexible in finding our community of practice in Prayer of the Heart, whether local or long distance.  We include the community of those who walk with us presently on the Prayer of the Heart path and the wisdom of those who have walked before.  We enter the stream of God's Love with other followers of the Way of the Heart in the eternal Present.

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 us to be faithful to our covenant of Refuge in Christ a friend in the spirit with whom we can discuss our covenant and daily practice from time to time. Having an experienced guide or teacher in Prayer of the Heart is a blessing indeed if such a person is nearby.

Our "Rule of Life" or " Personal Covenant with Christ" are vows of relational practice. Our Vows of Practice are akin to marriage or friendship 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 or deep friendship, return to our practice, our singular desire to give ourselves to the Love of Christ and find no refuge in any other thing. This singular desire, to "prefer nothing to Christ" is our life and the core of our vows of practice.

Our Wholehearted Yes to Christ

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 to respond to the invitation of Yeshua, to abide always in Him, in His Love. To be fully offered, fully given in love to Yeshua, our heart's desire, is the completion and fulfillment of the Christian path of consecrated life.

The Fire in the Cave of the Heart

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

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

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

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.

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