Defining Terms and Filling in Gaps.

For a minute, let's remember that wisdom is “Transmitted.” Not for nothing do Buddhist teachers speak of the “Lineage” their teaching is a part of. When a disciple cannot locate the a living tradition to reference, some wise figure from outside needs to awaken it. In this case, the case of rediscovering and reviving Wisdom, Solomon’s run in with the Queen of Sheba is paradigmatic. She visited and saw his wealth and wisdom for herself, she asked Solomon to produce his best wealth, then added some of her own.

Unfortunately, the storehouse of Christian Wisdom has gone so long unopened amid Enlightenment cries of “I THINK THEREFORE I AM” that disciples need other Wisdom traditions to remind them what they’re looking for. Christ’s words—that calling your brother a fool is hell itself—are drowned out amid Dualism’s “Hell below is worse than Earth, Heaven above is better than both.” Inter-religious dialogue, given the impediment Christianity is facing at the hands of wider society, is a needed wake up call.

In the wisdom traditions, pieces of a transformative journey tend to be the same across faiths. Buddhism had about 500 years to find its words before the birth of Christ—it stands to reason that it would be slightly quicker in identifying the turns on the map of changed consciousness. Since both major revivals of my Christian faith have happened at the hands of Buddhists (Thich Nhat Hanh at first, and then the Koan tradition) I will always feel that Shakyamuni is an other-christ, and revere him as such.

Just to keep the game straight, we should do a “comparative terminology” post, placing buddhism side by side with Christianity. Because I want to be able to describe the way of transformation fully, I’m finding this effort increasingly necessary. Often I’ll read about spiritual states in Buddhism and realize that Christianity’s corresponding state is either undeveloped or non-existent. Then I’ll re-examine the Christian tradition, realizing that descriptors for spiritual states have been there the whole time, we just never took the time to point to them.

It’s instructive that on the Christian side, at least two states of being had to be entirely fished out of the previous Tradition. This is a difficult state to be in, for Christianity. Imagine a buddhist and a christian are both in Toledo Ohio. If the Buddhist knows the word Toledo, if he’s spent time there, he’ll be able to be honest—and not terribly freaked by where he’s standing. If the Christian is busy thinking the Buddhist is wrong, that there’s no such thing as Toledo, he’ll appear judgmental—because why would the buddhist lie-- and deluded—because he himself is standing in Toledo and doesn’t know it.

So I’d just like to run down a list of Buddhist terms, and talk about their Christian equivalents.


1. Positive Samadhi: Samadhi is a state of mental equanimity that is undisturbed by desires. So long as one is sitting in meditation, this is fairly easy to rouse. Positive Samadhi is the state of equanimity enduring even though one has risen from meditation. (As a sidenote, positive samadhi is composed of Ki (Call) and Kyo (Response). The "Call Narrative" is a biblical device, a story composed of call, refusal, request for a sign, assurance of divine help and final obedience.  The story form is evident in the lives of such characters as The Exodus leader Moses and the Prophet Gideon.)  In Christianity, we're given a visual for the equivalent of Positive Samadhi in Jesus’ Via Dolorosa.  We merely use a different term, calling it "obedience."  The only problem with locating positive samadhi at the Cross is that obedience itself can look like attrition. In short, it can seem like the primary stressors in obedience are the external demands being made. In fact, in Christian obedience, the stress is interior: it comes from egotistical inability to accept the situation as it is. In buddhist terms, generally, the only stressors are internal ones: Ego, attachment, etc. These are the very stressors the passion narrative shows Christ as dealing with (If it is your will, let this cup pass from me= renouncing attachment. Not my will, but yours be done= Ego renunciation.) The truth is, suffering is pain we’ve not yet accepted.  In the christian story, the passion's external drama distracts Christians from the internal one.

2. Sati (mindfulness): Mindfulness, as far as I can tell, is the ability to do things in a space of presence between forcefulness and automatic pilot. In short, it’s a space of willingness, rather than willfulness. Instead of running the show, or going somewhere else in my head, I’m letting the situation guide me. The corresponding Christian category is called “recollection.” This is a state of not letting reality, not desire, guide action.  To be cheeky, recollection recalls the words of Master Yoda.  "Already have you, that which you need."  Recollection says that we need is God, and he isn't outside of us.

3. The 5 skandhas: The first three Skandhas are form(matter) feelings(whether we find something material pleasant or abhorrent) perceptions(the internalization of a thought-form related to an object, like the car I have in my head when you say “Mazda.”) The last two are mental formations(what “I” feel I “should” do with X) and Consciousness(the separation of a whole object into its aspects or component parts.) Suffice to say that a major objective of Buddhism is to stop Egotistically identifying with the 5 skandhas. The Christian Equivalent of this is the Dark Night of the Senses. This is when you find yourself not wanting the “stuff” you used to want. Television is boring, compulsive eating is overrated, compulsive sex takes too much work and isn’t the intimacy you’re looking for. It’s basically a state of “The whole world’s going crazy about X, and I don’t get the hype." The Dark Night of the Senses might be present if a student feels, among other things, anxiety, boredom or numbness in relation to a desire. It’s a sign of deepening “selfhood”—I take my Identity from “who I am” more than I do from desire and fulfillment.

4. Nirvikalpa Samadhi: This is a prayer state characterized by the withdrawal of the self from sense and awareness. To the outside observer, as I understand it, someone in Nirvikalpa Samadhi might fail to hear the bell at the end of meditation. The Hindu scriptures are full of people who followed their prajna energy through their Chakras, only to reach the Sanhasrara Chakra and go off-radar for a while. Nirvikalpa Samadhi’s Christian equivalent is Contemplation, a state of prayer marked by absence of words, thoughts, concepts or duality. 

5. The 5 Realms: Buddhists speak of 5 Realms. The God Realm and the Human Realm are the 2 “top” or “good” realms. The Animal realm, the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts, and the Hell Realm are the bottom three. When we’re reincarnated, we’re reincarnated into one of these realms. Just like the skandhas, our objective is to ultimately dis-identify with these realms to attain nirvana, a state exempt from rebirth. The nearest Christian equivalent of this is “interacting with things themselves, not our thoughts about them." We have lots of ideas about God, but none of those ideas are God himself. St. Augustine said “If you can understand it, it isn’t God.” St. Paul spends a whole long time at the beginning of his letter to the Romans talking about how people substituted their concepts of God for God himself, then exchanged the creature for the creator and fell into idolatry. To be emptied of our attachments to our ideas about divinity is to undergo the Dark Night of the Soul.  We have ideas about heaven and earth and ostriches and spooks, but none of them are the things themselves. It’s important to note that for the Christian, freedom from “our concepts about things” and communion with the thing itself leads to a non-dual relationship with it. To an observer, I am looking at the flower, but from the inside out there is no “I,” no “flower” and no “seeing.” To use a Buddhist term, the flower and I are simply “interbeing."

6. Absolute Samadhi: This is a stage of spiritual growth, a bona fide part of the truth that leads to Nirvana. In Absolute Samadhi, there are no higher or lower truths, no better or worse practices. Better or worse, higher or lower—these are all labels imposed by selves according to desires, and in Absolute Samadhi, selves and desires begin not to be active. This is where, shockingly, we discover that CHRISTIANITY HAS NO EQUIVALENT TERM. I’ve decided to call the Christian equivalent “Suspension.” The term comes from St. Guerric of Igny, who said that a person who’s crucified with Christ has neither the things of earth, nor the things of heaven. On account of the nails, a crucified man can no sooner draw near to his redeemer than he can avoid the undesirables among his fellowmen. We see signs of this in the book of Genesis, when Rebekah’s parents Laban and Bethuel respond to Isaac’s marriage proposal with the words “We cannot say one thing to you, bad or good. The thing comes from the Lord.” This is important. As one becomes closer to God-as-he-is, opposites disintegrate. Morality ceases be a matter of conforming to a disembodied system of rules. An action is moral based on whether or not it worsens our attachment to self and desire. At first blush, this looks like “relativism--“ morality with no objective reference point at all. But remember that self, desire and attachment are the reference points. Just as, in absolute Samadhi, the dharma runs the game so Buddha Nature can emerge, so in Suspension, the gospel helps our inner-other-christ emerge.

7. Enlightenment: This is a state of increased humility, or deepening non-self. This is another place where Christianity entirely lacks an equivalent term. Two weeks ago, an Under the Influencepost referenced the Dark Night of the Self, a term of its own devise. The Dark Night of the Self was intended to troubleshoot our relationship with our false selves, and the desires that create them. The premise is that sometimes, even a healthy ego isn’t the solution to a wounded one. Better desires aren’t necessarily the answer to unhealthy ones. Non-self and Non-desire need a Christian voice, if we’re going to take those things on. Humility, then, is the best concept we have for this, but we should be careful not to define that as “my desire not to be so prideful.” Still, there, self and desire run the game. There might be a way to “cut off thoughts of self and desire,” but at worst, in trying to eliminate the thoughts, we might get caught up in them. The better way to handle thoughts of self and desire is to treat them like blades of grass to a man in need of glasses. They arise, we don’t go nuts about them, and we let them be “backdrop” for what’s really going on. Nothing to see here, folks...

8. Nirvana: To a buddhist, this is a state when all the karmic clinginess has been cleansed from a person. Rebirths are not necessary, because no part of a person’s self-consciousness, no clinging to the skandas remains, it has all yielded to cosmic consciousness. The nearest that a Christian comes to this is Divinization. When a Christian is divinized, separate self-consciousness ceases to distinguish Christ from the faithful, the faithful from God. If my speculations about Christian reincarnation are are right, a Christian, thus fully transformed by Christ’s paradigm, would need no further incarnations.


When two equally competent masters meet, they don’t compete.  They battle to better one another: if there's an element of "showmanship" involved, it's so the other sees, when sitting at the feet of a particular tradition, what's best about it. When the queen of Sheba saw Solomon’s wealth and wisdom, the scripture says “there was no more spirit in her.” Both came bearing gifts—par for the course among equals— and both went away richer than they’d come.

As the search for Wisdom goes, we could do worse.

A Revised View of Time: Christian Reincarnation Revisited

To start a sentence with “I believe” and end it with “in Christian reincarnation” is perhaps, at this point, more than I’m ready to commit to.  I, myself, have no recollection of past lives. If we see time as linear, the sheer number of myriad Catholics, whose myriad incarnations would proceed from time’s beginning till now—these all make Christian reincarnation a dizzying possibility to consider. The objective of the post “Crucified and Risen: A theory of Christian Reincarnation” remains a good one—seeking, as it did, to explain the experiences of the Christians I’d known who’ve remembered living past lives. But doing so requires that we look critically at our view of time, at the Christian view of spiritual actualization, at who precisely is the one—in a proper view of Christian reincarnation—who is constantly being reborn, living, giving and receiving teachings, suffering, dying, rising, manifesting as a stranger, identifying with all creation, and ascending.  In light of all that, saying that "Christ's perpetually incarnates" is another way of expressing Christian Reincarnation.  Similarly, time, when it flows, does so in a circular pattern, and present moments have more to do with detaching from falseness than Christianity has previously admitted.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the Church has the resources to buy in to Christian reincarnation. The Church already condemned the “Preexistence of Souls” back when Origen wrote about it. There wasn’t a time when souls existed before they became human, said the Church. But the crux of this issue isn’t about existence—in this moment, no two people having a discussion doubt their own existence. “The Preexistence of Souls” is really about whether times other than now exist. In short, whether souls existed before bodies would matter less if we could figure out whether “before and after” exist. As it was, the Church busied itself excommunicating those who believed souls existed before bodies, thereby missing its opportunity to proclaim that neither the past nor the future exist, that “now” is the only moment there is.

The Church’s linear view of time is a problem—as the post “Koans and Care: the Dangers of Dualism” said. The Church sees time as a linear and dualistic medium in which God, who is in heaven, chooses a particular historical moment to take flesh in Christ, who is on earth. The Church condemned Arius for saying “there was a time when [Christ] was not.” This argument could have taught that“now” is the only existing moment, but it became, instead about whether Christ existed before “now.” In maintaining this dualistic view of time, Christ’s de facto absence from certain portions of time reasserts itself.

A more helpful way to frame it, and the model I’ve come to use personally, is this: rather than being linear, time is a circular double helix. On that double helix, Christ’s historical incarnation is one of the “rungs,” just as all of our incarnations are. But Christ is also the entire circular double helix. Furthermore, we speak of Kairos time and Chronos time, the present moment and the successive string of moments respectively, as moments in-and-out of which God bobs. That’s the “Deus ex machina” argument with little interruptions—that God wound up time and creation, and basically left them to whirl about except for the 33 years Jesus took flesh—when God issued some correctives. Hear the dualism in that idea: God “took flesh” when all flesh was God’s in the first place. God chose “the fullness of time” to come, and yet all time was his in the first place. God “came to redeem all creation—“ had God been previously neglecting it?

This is in fact, not the case. To kairos time and chronos time, it seems important to add a third category. To use a phrase that means “The Master’s Time,” I’d like to suggest we begin to speak of Kyrios time: the time when individuals become their true selves, which is at once “hidden with Christ” and is Christ. Christ was born, lived, suffered died and rose in the now. Christ appeared to his apostles as a stranger in the now, his students to recognize him in each other in the now, ascended in the now because the teaching was his body too. There is no part of time from which the body of Christ was absent, and eventually the Church’s task is to become that Body.

One of Christ’s biggest objectives in taking flesh was to show them that time itself had been Christ’s mystical body the whole time. Kairos time, the now in which Christ manifests himself, and Chronos time, the history Christ recapitulates, are both preparations for a now in which we see that Christ is our true selves. Christ has been reality the whole time. “In the beginning was the Word” simply means that the Logos is a set of laws each incarnation, living in the now, obeys. “The fullness of time” of which the bible speaks actually means “the fullness of this particular chronological understanding of history.” Were time as full as scripture claimed, there would be nothing left to actualize. Properly understood, the “fullness of time” is the point at which we all realize, (right now, the only time that exists) that we are Christ. Additionally, that “Christ was with the Logos in the beginning” is simply a statement that the laws Christ’s incarnation followed were paradigmatic of all incarnations. If there is, in the present moment, a progression, it’s in the individual believer’s consciousness: from denial to consciousness, through the working out of their “purgatorial predicament.” Each believer moves, by and by, from individual consciousness to cosmic consciousness.

Time as a circular double helix is not a new idea, just an old one reapplied. In a move that retrieves the snake from the blame for universal human sinfulness, Jeremy Narby claims, with Shamanic tribes, that the mother of the Logos is a snake. He claims that mystical experience grants shamans access to certain “inner senses” with which they see biological structures like cells from the inside out. DNA is the “snake” who is the foundation of all life. I’m simply claiming that the circular double helix is also time itself: it’s the present moment (kairos time), it’s the apparent “flow of moments” that comes from our being stuck in a purgatorial predicament (chronos time), and it’s every event by which Christ teaches us to come out of denial and become his body ourselves (kyrios time).

Kyrios Time is not a new concept, just an old one, more accurately labeled. St. Paul thought the physical world would end, that a messiah separate from the believing community would return in his lifetime. The messiah apparently failed to do that—which is itself a perfect expression of the self-emptying implied in the Logos—causing Paul to expand his theory of the end times, his eschatology. The trouble is, he expanded it in a dualistic, illusory direction. Instead of his former immanent eschatology—saying the end is now—Paul and the Church began to employ “delayed eschatology”—saying the end is later. The fact is, the end was more about telos—purpose or potential—than it was about the ceasing of chronological time. What Paul was speaking about was Kyrios time, with its invitation that all people cease to identify with their falseness and become Christ in this moment.

Seen in a non-linear fashion, and in light of the perpetual incarnation of Christ, time seems ripe to accommodate Christian reincarnation. It isn’t “particular souls” that are reborn. Instead, Christ is all time and all potential, realized in each life. Insofar as birth is a perpetual happening, Christ is the one who is reborn. He is, for all people, perpetually present, perpetually doing all of the incarnating, living and teaching dying and rising, all of the identifying himself with our own true nature. We experience ourselves as “selves” distinct from Christ because we’re still attached to bits of our false selves. Those bits of “false self” may even seem like the accumulated sensation of “past lives.” If we spend the now which is our lifetime disentangling from those attachments, the Christ we truly are might come to light. If we become further entangled, that Christ will be obscured.

Tradition already hints at this. The term “alter-christus,” a way of speaking of the priest as “another Christ” is, properly and rightly these days, broadened to all Christians. Therese of Liseux said “Christ has no body now but yours.” The post-resurrection appearances of Christ teach us nothing if not that we, with the constant help of grace and the outpouring of the spirit, are Christ as well.

It’s important to clarify: Christ is consciousness, not self-consciousness. One who self-consciously claims that he is the Christ, and everyone else isn’t—that person might be a maniac with a savior complex, or an idolater. To paraphrase Ram Dass, “when an ordinary man pursues wisdom, he becomes a sage, when a sage pursues wisdom he becomes an ordinary man.” The enlightened one, at the moment of kyrios time may “realize he’s Christ” or he may not. If he realizes that he is Christ, he also realizes that everyone else is Christ as well—and that each moment and all time is Christ etc., etc. In short, the man who is Christ is like everyone else.

If he does not "realize he’s Christ” a student may still experience Kyrios time. As I wrote about in “Orthomorphosis: An Effort to Say the Whole Word,” he may either realize the illusory nature of self, desire, mind and body. Or, as the “Drawing from the Old Wells” posts claimed, It may manifest as it does in St. Benedict’s “Ladder of Humility.” A student may realize the full extent of the tension between his sinfulness and God’s love. All of those ways are one in the same. They all produce Christ.

Let me end by revealing why this is all a personal question for me: I have often wondered why I was born with a disability. Shallow as it is, I’ve tried to make meaning out of “what I did to deserve it.”

In the gospels, Jesus dismisses the old belief that disabilities in children are due to the sins of parents. For a while I believed that there was a causal link between what my parents left “ungrieved” and the sadness I felt. I had grand notions of learning the Jewish prayer for the dying, saying Kaddish for former generations. While that might be applicable if we look at my life in terms of limbic resonance, limbic regulation and limbic revision, it ultimately doesn’t help me much. My mom and dad have their own, heavy purgatorial predicaments to negotiate. There’s no use in my owning what isn’t mine.

In the same Gospel story, Jesus says these things happen so that God’s glory would be revealed: with apologies to my close and personal savior, I find that inadequate too. Particularly because I am disabled, don’t want to ride the short bus of my own uniqueness into God’s consoling arms, I want to be normal and anonymous. God wouldn’t wish something bad on me so that he could grandstand or showcase his awesomeness. He wouldn’t call me special as a way of highlighting my isolation. These days, the most adequate explanation I can find for “why I am the way I am” is that every sensation in my body, painful or otherwise, with which I’m preoccupied is an attachment from a past life, stored in my body. Every thought to which I’m too attached was gained in a past life.

In this way, the reasons for who I am are nobody’s fault but mine, but the kindness of my own purgatorial predicament comes to the fore. It’s a mercy that I would see my attachments to forms at all—as “Orthomorphosis: an Effort to Say the Whole Word” said, it’s a mercy that I would at all perceive the invitation to let go of self, desire, mind and sensation and the body. I don’t know “who I was” in any of my theoretical past lives, and it absolutely, completely doesn’t matter. I was what I am, and what everyone was and is: Christ himself, just with enough clingy bits that I, and a number of other “Christs” missed the truth of it entirely.

In this incarnation, I am disgustingly aware of spiritual realities. If this has yielded anything true, that is a party bonus: but it’s more accurate, meanwhile, to say, with St. Augustine, “si comprehendis, non est Deus.” If you comprehend it, it isn’t God. Near as I can guess, the defining characteristic of my present purgatorial predicament, of the calling that seems my slice of this moment’s vocational pie, is to look honestly at it all. If my intuition is right, (inshallah, may it be so) whatever honesty I can muster in this life is a letting go of accumulated denial from past lives. If I can be more conscious, more at home in the present moment, the semi permanent egoic distance that the Dark Night of the Self grants, which seems to be my lot to yap about—it might be more fully accomplished. The Divinization that is the culmination of shedding false selves—when, (if I’m right about Christian reincarnation) the cycle of rebirths ceases and separate self consciousness no longer separates me from the Triune Godhead—may God keep me awake for it.

As to how true any of this is, I don’t know: God knows. I’m looking forward to it, and by forward, forever within and within and within.

On Trendy Brunch Spots and the Dark Night of the Self

I met the Hafe, and his wife of two weeks, at one of Greenville, South Carolina's trendy farm-to-fork brunch joints. By accident of providence, my “college best friend”--the Hafe himself--and one of my two “monastery best friends” both lived in Greenville, and they both married their respective wives last May. It was the morning before Hanuman Dass--one of the "monastery best friends"-- was to tie his own knot. I’d been in Greenville two weeks ago, serving as a groomsman in Hafe’s wedding to Mrs. The Hafe. I hadn’t known her previous to the wedding weekend—and wedding weekends will forever be crappy opportunities to actually connect with brides and grooms. This was to be my first chance to get acquainted with her, and a long overdue chance to connect with my former college roommate.

I called him “the Hafe.” My Jackie was stunned to learn, when I once called him Bryan—his first name— that I’d actually been talking about him for years. The Hafe shared a chill degree of Church-nerdery with me: we spent college ending up at the same daily Masses, praying morning and evening prayer daily, and pilgrimaging to monasteries for silent retreats over our breaks.

Me and The Hafe (El Haferino, if you're not
into that whole "brevity" thing.)

A couple weeks earlier, when they made the mistake of yielding the rehearsal-dinner MC mic to me, I looked directly at Mrs. the Hafe and told the following story. “Without saying too much, my family,” I said, “puts a little bit of the ‘fun’ in dysfunctional. Hafe graduated a year after I did, and I remember a day, when I was home on break during his Senior year. All things ‘family’ were conflicted enough one night that I felt I couldn’t go home. I asked the Hafe if I could crash on his dorm room floor. He said I could. I fell asleep that night having borrowed one of his pillows. When I awoke in the morning, Hafe had covered me with the blanket from his own bed. He’d covered himself with the trench coat he kept hanging on the back of his door.”

I looked at Hafe's wife-to-be, debated how honest to be with strangers, and the degree to which I wanted to publicly embarrass the Hafe. What I said was “You’re marrying a good man. Take care of him, because he’ll bend over backwards to take care of you.” Draft one, in my head, had gone "You’re marrying Jesus. Don’t forget that.” But I thought better of stating the truth too strongly. With strangers, that kinda thing can get creepy fast.

Back to bougie brunch venues, two weeks later. I sat down with the Hafe, and Mrs. the Hafe. “I’m really glad we’re getting this chance to connect. I also realize we don’t know each other’s back stories. How much has Hafe told you? Like, did he mention I spent 7 years living in a monastery?” For better or worse, this is the detail to which all others are footnotes.

Mrs. the Hafe said “Yeah, Bryan told me a bit about that. But I have lots of questions.”

All of this was fairly predictable. I’ve been telling “the monastery story” to first-time acquaintances for years. I was glad to be telling it to Hafe’s wife—at least the “retelling” was to someone I could, for Hafe’s sake, trust implicitly. “A lot of people are curious about that." I said "Can you identify the things you’re most curious about?”

She led with another classic curiosity: “I guess I’m wondering what would have made you enter the monastery, and what would have made you leave.”

“Thanks for asking me to tell the story. It always helps to retell it.” In the first place, my intended major was English, right up to the middle of my senior year. That year, when my parents divorced, I switched it to theology. A lot of different things went in to that. I’d just made a few humdinger adult mistakes, and was, on some level, trying to avoid facing them. I was losing parental stability, and the Church stood in to provide structure. Of course, that all happened when I was 18, and it took me till I was 27 to see it. On top of that, after the writings of a buddhist monk taught me a way to meditate, my prayer life absolutely ignited. A person’s initial forays into intentionally bettering their prayer life are often eventful: they’re full of tiny run-ins with altered states of consciousness. Such was the case with mine, and I began, subtly, to change my entire life and identity because of all this. None of this is any different than anyone else in the initial stages of the spiritual life, but I thought I was unique indeed. I lived all of college, and met your husband, during this time.”

By the end of college, I was becoming more and more depressed. There weren’t many of the typical joys of life that were untouched by that depression. Hafe, do you remember the birthday party you threw me, senior year of college?”

He nodded that he did. “That was a great party” he said.

“You’re right,” I agreed, “it was a great party. I was surrounded by people who care about me. But I couldn’t connect with them. That kind of thing—not being able to connect with the good things right in front of me-- would become an issue more and more. Later I’d realize that, broadly, my depression was showing me the difference between compulsive thought (which eventually expresses itself in compulsive action) and deliberate thought. As college ended, I used the only language for that material that I had: the "wrestling with demons" language of the desert fathers. I read Malachi Martin's book Hostage to the Devil and it terrified me. See, it portrayed demonic possession as happening because of the routine turnings of the mind. So now there were two reasons to continue to pray: an attraction to the consolations I was experiencing in prayer and an aversion to potential demonic possession.”

“Let me just stop you there—“ Mrs. the Hafe interjected, cradling her visibly furrowed brow in her non-coffee mug hand. “I just want to say that I find the demonic terrifying. To the point that it’s hard to talk about.”

“I do too,” I said. “But that was part of the good contribution monasticism made in my life. Even if we all cooperate with evil a little bit, and we all do, God’s help is ultimately the thing that people need to stay safe from total, overt demonic possession. So it was a comfort to begin prayer 7 times a day with the same words. Hafe knows them, we prayed them all through college.”

I pointed at Hafe, who chimed in “O God, come to my assistance, O Lord, make haste to help me.”

“Right.” I said, "So I guess, in order to handle my fear of evil, I try to stay in that space of resorting to God’s help. The hows and whys of doing that have been difficulty to learn, but it’s how I’ve handled the risk."

Hafe got up to warm up his coffee. "Let me preface this next bit by saying: I wish Catholics weren’t so Dualistic. I wish they didn’t give away so many Religious Hero Cookies to people in the midst of spiritual transition. We usually use John of the Cross’ category of “Dark Night of the Senses” to describe a stage where great saints start to care less about the world. I don’t know if I’ve been through it, and I don't care.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it. In any case, after that first period, when people described the Dark Night of the Senses, I could empathize. When I began to pursue religion, I formed my whole identity around it. I referred to it as my “vocation” and I entered the monastery because of it.

"I found in the monastery, that I could lengthen the effects of consolations by interior pushing and self will, I found I could lengthen grace by way of adrenaline. This move was ultimately more of a substitution than anything else. Also, though, part of the 'substituting adrenaline for Grace' maneuver of putting myself above other people. It’s the 'my life is graced and I'm surrounded by assholes' move. For a long time, this made my life with the brothers difficult. What I eventually found is that I had made a god out of my own thoughts about God, and I had made a a drug out of the adrenaline of self-will, calling it all Grace. This, too, is a pretty typical move: St. Paul experienced something similar when his relationship to the Law soured. I realized then that I had left my upbringing and psychological wounds unaddressed, that I’d begun using region addictively because of it, and that the whole thing was affecting my entire adult worldview. This led me to join Adult Children of Alcoholics. I got honest about the ways I was treating prayer like a drug and not facing the trauma I’d been left with. The “Power greater than yourself” language of the 12 steps was important. It confirmed for me that, if I’m thinking about God, I might well be going in the right direction, but I haven’t, by any means, arrived. In part, I left the monastery, because all I could see was how selfish and idolatrous my previous use of it had been. I couldn’t find a way to work with it healthily."

"Let me run and get a glass of water real quick." Hafe's wife said "Does anybody need anything?"

“No worries, and I'm fine” I replied, “This will give the overly-talkative former college-roommate a chance to shove some food in his face.”

Mrs. the Hafe said “You’re not overly-talkative. I actually think you should write some of this down. I think it would help people.” I made a mental note to talk up my blog, after I was done talking up myself.  I was starting to annoy myself.  I was monopolizing the conversation and I knew it, but I hadn’t “told my story” this fully in years. It was good, and anyway here we all were, having this conversation. Later, I’d shut my fat cake hole. For now, I continued.

"Again, leave Spiritual Hero Cookies aside: I don’t know if I’ve been through the Dark Night of the Soul. But I can empathize with it. For years, after leaving the monastery, I couldn’t think of God without getting a headache and feeling nauseous. I grieve in a real PTSD kinda way, storing tension in my body. Add into that mix the gluten allergy I was diagnosed with after leaving the monastery, and what you’ve got is a person who feels a bit weird about the things of the world—I only want them when I’m insecure and self-comforting—you’ve got a bloke who feels weird about anything perceptibly Spiritual, and you’ve got a bloke who started out highly devoted to the Eucharist, only to become allergic to it. It doesn’t leave me a lot to hang on to.”

At that point, Mrs. the Hafe reached across the table with her right hand, knocking over her coffee. “Oh God,” She said, “I’m sorry.” We found every paper napkin within 20 feet in a matter of seconds.  No one got terrifically wet.

"No harm, no foul," I said, "So alright, if we can call what I went through the dark night of the senses, I detached from possessions. But then started treating things of God like they were possessions. I ran the game when I was attached to the world, and ran the game when I was attached to God. And eventually, both things lost their lustre. All of this is normal--I came to see it's just how desire works.  Sometimes that happens because I've obtained the thing I want. But I’m coming to see that it can also happen when I’m being asked to question myself—the one who’s doing the wanting, in other words."

"If I’ve been through the dark nights, they left some work undone. Until recently—and still today, if I’m not careful—when thoughts of self came up I shoved them down, tried to deny I was having them…because it’s good to be selfless, yada yada yada. What that really is, though, is using the self to repress thoughts about self. Whoever 'I' am, I’m still attached enough to thoughts of self to react negatively to them. Nowadays it’s hard to think about devotion to God, because it seems to do two things. First, it relies on my actions, not God’s, and second, it puts God at a distance from me."

"What I’ve come to see about Catholicism is that, though we have the dark nights of the senses and the soul, we need a third category: the dark night of the self. Ultimately, this would account for the way the spiritual life relativizes the self and desire. The fact is, sometimes labelling things as “better or worse, higher or lower, good or evil” gets old. Sometimes the distance implied in so many parts of religion gets wearisome—when we see heaven as above us, hell as below, when we call out to or think about a God who is always distant from us—well, sometimes that happens because we think dualistically. It has nothing to do with God, and everything to do with the egotistical dividedness of the the one doing the thinking."

"The Desert Fathers taught that end-stage Pride, a mixture of all the preceding evil thoughts, created a false self. All of the desires we gratify shore up that false self. Helpfully, the Church later adopted Freud’s term 'Ego.' All of our numerous thoughts about self come from that. St. Paul went in the direction of questioning self, saying 'my true self is hidden with Christ in God.' He said it would be revealed when Christ is revealed, and we saw him as he was. Contemplatives have, for centuries, been saying that the dualistic subject-object relationship between supplicants and God goes away in contemplative prayer. If there are separate selves, we cease to be aware of them. The Christian East has said that our common destiny is to be 'Divinized.' I don’t know all the details—because I’ve only just begun intuiting this, let alone experiencing it— but it stands to reason that, for the divinized, imperceptibility of separate selfhood is fairly permanent."

“Wait,” Mrs. Haffey interjected. “Doesn’t that make us into Gods, and isn’t that the sin of Adam?”

“This is why it’s key to allow concepts like ‘God’ and ‘self’ to diminish in importance” I said. “In this life, at his moment of fullest divine union, Jesus was nailed to a Cross and screaming ‘Father, why have you forsaken me?’ The end-stage of Benedict’s Ladder of Humility says that a person who is united to God doesn’t know it. He’s just a guy who knows his shortcomings, for whom life in the world isn’t a come-on. And furthermore, a person united to God knows that divinization is everybody’s reality—that everybody is God, and we’re all supposed to know it eventually. It’s not ‘I’m the only one who’s God.’ It would be a sin if it were a source of specialness or manipulation."

“The Dark Night of the Self would mean a couple of important things. It would mean that our thoughts about things aren’t the things themselves. Self-consciousness gets in the way of consciousness, in other words. The God who can be named is not the Eternal God. The World that can be analyzed is not the reality of the world. If we know that we know something, we don’t really know it."

"The Dark Night of the Self would begin to reveal God everywhere. Br. Lawrence of the Resurrection, whose 'practice of the present moment' taught that God used all things to connect with us, and Jeremy Narby, who more recently taught that God was communicating, intelligently and metaphorically, through the Logos that pervaded the world—both of these would be important keystones of the Dark Night of the Self. If the 'self' has ceased to treat God as 'other,' then it isn’t just some things that speak of God. It’s everything. We mightn’t be able to tap into that—bid trees to bloom in winter, as St. Francis of Assisi did—but it all serves as proof in the pudding."

"The Dark Night of the Self would render God a bit more all-pervasive, less specifically subjective. The Trinity, 'The Godhead,' is a more useful object for our meditation than any one person of the Trinity—because we’ll lose track of the three for the sake of the one as we’re more fully divinized anyway. The full force of the Name of God hits a person here. When I’m not thinking of myself, but am instead being myself, then I touch that part of who I AM that has always been part of God."


"Along with loss of identity, all the force drains out of our tryingto do good and avoid evil. The dark night of the self emphasizes the 'purgatorial predicament:' that is, the doing of a certain amount of our purgatory on earth, in this life. Though we’re subject to God, not to fate or destiny or determinism, it seems to be God's modus operandi to make people look fully at their own faults. Even though religion says sinning is bad, there’s a long history of spiritual practitioners getting handed over to the Pauline 'thorns in the flesh' for humility’s sake. The Apostles’ desertion of Christ wasn’t their finest moment, but it happened, and God used it to teach them. Those alternations aren’t good or bad, and they aren’t brought on by our efforts. We’re subject to them, just as we are to God’s love. In the end, it seems to be the gentlest way God has found to get us humans, who are stuck in denial and fearful of truth, to safely face ourselves.”

I paused. By now, my coffee was cold, the breakfast crowd was starting to securely yield to the early lunch folks, and I was realizing that what I was saying was a lot for me to handle, much less someone else. "I should probably be getting back to my other two soon-to-be newly weds”

“This is all good stuff” Mrs. the Hafe said, draining her latest cup of lukewarm coffee.

“What gets my goat is that it’s nothing new.” I said "The Church has always taught these things. But the Dark Night of the Self boils them down to Self and Desire, its two central issues. This kind of Spiritual Stage would leave us 'in the world, but not of the world.' We will always interact with the things of the world. It’s our Egos, and our Attachments to the world, that the dark night of the self would troubleshoot. The reality of God will always be the entire solution, but we need a way to identify thoughts of God and religion—at least for those of us still caught in our Egos—as part of the problem. My ability to let thoughts of self and possessions go, my ability to refrain from manipulating emotions or people based on my ideas of good and evil, perhaps detaching from these would happen faster if I knew there was no way I could affect them by force. But enough—enough of my rambling. Kerstin, don’t ever give a church nerd license to theologize. And I really hope that next time, I’ll give myself over to more listening.”

Bryan, coffee finished and poised to leave, said “We’ve got to find a way for you to be down here more permanently.”

I hugged him, and told him I’d work on it. Then I turned toward his wife “I sometimes forget how important telling my story is in the process of living it. It’s a providence to find someone so willing to listen. Next time I want to hear yours.” She promised it would happen, and we parted. To close, it only remains to promise one thing: Mrs. the Hafe, you have my word. Yourlife story won’t become my next blogpost.