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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Unified Life- Disciplined Life

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

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

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