How I Found God in Everyone and Everywhere: An Anthology of Spiritual Memoirs
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What followed is the common “carrot on the stick” theology and spirituality, which kept the flock returning for our essential ministrations of sacraments and sermons—to overcome the gap that was not even
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there, according to the testimony of many Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant mystics. Meanwhile most classic lay mystics like Catherine of Genoa just kept shouting without apology or explanation, “My deepest me is God!”
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“An absolutely alienated God alienates absolutely.”
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“prayer of quiet,” or what they called the Philokalia, “the shedding of thought”—
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Contemplative prayer is considered dangerous or even demonic by some! Mostly I fear because it will make their external ministrations less necessary and important. And they are right in one way—there is nothing more liberating and energizing than an actual life of deep prayer!
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The church on the corner had real fear of depth because it looked like it led to pantheism to them. And we had God fully localized in our church!
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More often than not, the statements of our tested mystics are very subtle and mysterious, holding a creative tension, but always pointing toward objective relationship or even interbeing between God and the soul—while also preserving essential difference—exactly as in the one life of the three persons of the Trinity. The Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Father, and yet they are
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also ONE. Trinity is the code breaker!
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If we had been more Trinitarian in our practical Christianity, we would have had the ideal and perfect template for preserving both clear diversity and absolute unity, but one needs a contemplative or non-dual mind to be at home with the mystery of Trinity, and most Christians were not taught the orthodox Christian shape of ...
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“transactional” Christianity much more than any real transformational Christianity.
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We ended up largely worshiping Jesus instead of following him or imitating him.
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‘God passed into humanity so that humanity might pass over into God.’”
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(We made Peter the first apostle, for example, whereas the Gospel accounts clearly make Mary Magdalene the apostle to the apostles.) When revelation confronts culture, culture usually wins.
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We had thought our form was merely human, but Jesus came to tell us that our actual form is human-divine, just as his is.
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“Adoptionism” was much stronger in the early church than the later Catholic and Lutheran emphasis on individual “justification” of souls. We first localized salvation in creation and history itself, and not the later problem solving rescue for a few, or what Matthew Fox calls “Fall-Redemption” spirituality.
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We were given the full courage to appropriate our “full and final participation” through and in Jesus, who clearly believed that God was not so much inviting us into a distant heaven, but inviting us into Godself as friends and co-participants already now. Remember, we are not talking about a perfect psychological or moral wholeness in humans, which is never the case, and probably this is why many dismiss the doctrine of divinization—or feel rightly incapable of it. I am talking about a freely and objectively implanted “sharing in the divine nature” as a gift from
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God to all that God created (2 Peter 1:4). This is the totally positive substratum on which we must and alone can ever build a civilization of love and inclusivity.
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Many have been predicting that the next century in Christian theology must be and will be a “turn toward participation” instead of walking around merely observing, critiq...
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Instead what we have today is what Ken Wilber sadly calls “aperspectival madness” and some even call a “post-truth world” as we have seen in the recent American election cycle. Christians have not deeply believed or proclaimed their own Good News up to now, and they ended up thinking the goal was to abandon or be allowed to destroy “the
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late great planet earth,” which Pope Francis instead calls “our common home.”
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By a lack of a deep inner Christianity we have ended up not having a strong outer Christianity either. In the world of religion, you ...
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imperfection of the normal individual just could not fully carry “the weight of glory.”
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Note that the early covenants were all with society and history and dynasties, with Israel as a whole, and even with creation but never about individuals “going to heaven.”
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This seemingly impossible idea of real and objective union with God is still something we’re so afraid of that most of us won’t allow ourselves to think it, especially if we stay on the surface of cultural Christianity.
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Joseph Chilton Pearce’s book, The Biology of Transcendence,
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Your native, indigenous character as a child of God has been distorted….”6
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Divine union is not uniformity but precisely diversity loved and overcome! Only the contemplative, non-dual mind can process this, not the rational dualistic mind. God is a mystery of relationship, an event of communion, a verb more than a noun, and so is everything God created “in his own image.” We are both distinct from God and yet one with God at the same time. This is precisely the mystery of divine relatedness and communion.7
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So Christianity is not offering some naïve “everything is one”; but instead it offers humanity what neither our religion nor our politics up to now have been able to achieve—the balancing act between protecting difference and achieving union—where the head is not the foot, and the eye is not the hand, yet all are part of the One Body of Christ (Corinthians 12:12-30).
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We must study, pray, wait, reconcile, and work to achieve this kind of unity—and never an impossible uniformity, which was t...
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notion of Christendom, the later notion of Communism, and most “isms” in between. This is, in the end, a spiritual insight, grace, and possibility, which is why, for all of its weakness...
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Our job is not to discover it as if for the first time, but only to retrieve what has been discovered—and lost—
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But do remember this: What we are looking for is what is doing the looking, which is exactly why Jesus said we will always find it (Matthew 7:7-9); because we already have it.
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Instead,
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divinity reveals itself as permeating all worlds. There is nothing, nothing in the world, no moment of time, no place, no created event, that is not marinating in God.
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Instead, panentheism articulates the insight that the very universe sings with the breath of God, that God is, as the ancient Hebrew author understood, chei ha-olamim, the very life of the cosmos. So we live and breathe and walk God; and we reach out and we celebrate God. In doing the work of social justice; and of binding the wounds; and of grieving together and rejoicing together, we do God in the world.
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