God called all things good and holy, revealed himself as “I am,” then called you to self-emptying, in imitation of your teacher. And that begat a fair question. You looked at holiness and goodness, at everything that makes up your self, and said “if I give all this up, what will you use to guide me?” I watched the question play hell on mind, emotions and nervous system. I kept whispering “give up self, do not judge.” I kept saying “prophesy to the dry bones, the flesh and the breath,” so that every level of your embodied existence could let go and hear what I am telling you. In reality, you will be listening ever more deeply until your last breath. So settle in. Eat something–lest the journey be too much for you. “Who you think you are” will not get out of this alive. But rejoice, because the rest of you has a fair chance at it. [bxA]
You have heard it said “if the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?” And again “keep listening, but do not understand. Keep looking, but do not comprehend.” I’m inviting you to let go of “mind.” Therefore, though you know that what’s in front of you is the holy one of God, listen when the abyss says “be quiet and come out of him.” When the mind sits still enough so that both you and the hearing are here and now, it will be the Lord who speaks. To the question “what will you use to guide me” the Lord’s answer is “everything.”
On every level, I am working for your healing. The Word--as some have called me--doesn’t always beget an intellectual process that proceeds, by reason, toward certainties of faith. The Word isn’t always the “ordering principle of the universe.” Sometimes the Word permits fears and doubts so you can intuit the truth by realization, make decisions, work toward increased manageability. This means that “the Word is a double edged sword”--that it creates discernment, teaching the difference between action and thought, thought and emotion, emotion and sensation, sensation and energy. Slowly you will learn how your own judgment negatively affects your serenity. The key of knowledge will always be experience, and you must never deprive yourself of it.
That you might, more deeply, catechize yourself: I am the one who, in your prayer, creates the echoes. You told the Father you were tired–and you found no rest–until you heard your own prayer and began to create rest for yourself. You lifted your eyes to the mountains–wondering where your help was going to come from–until you saw yourself doing it, and began to help yourself. I am the one who helped Christ see himself in all things, and all things in himself. As it is written “whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me” and again “I in them and they in me, that they may be completely one.” I am the one who waits at the question words–until who becomes “you,” until where becomes “here,” until what becomes a paradox of nothingness in everything, until when becomes “now” and “how” becomes just like this. I am the one who helped you hear God say “know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go…and I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Indeed, it’s never “that” that is the house of God and the gate of heaven. It is “this.” It is never “that” that is the body of Christ, it is always “this.” You have heard it said “the glory of God is man fully alive.” I say to you “A person fully alive is a student, here and now.”
If your track record with right belief and right practice is spotty–or even if all of your efforts in that direction have only left you exhausted, then right transformation is the only goal worth pursuing. It is to those who can hear when the Teacher says “give up self, take up your cross and follow” and “do not judge, lest you be judged”--it’s to those, see, that what follows is addressed. You will know in your body how much calmer you could be if you ceased using the positive feelings faith creates to end-run around your flaws and trauma. You will know how much more energy you’ll have if you stop viewing your consolations like merit badges that make you better than others. You will be asked to get honest about your attachments–the impairment of willingness that’s limited by attraction to pleasure and aversion to pain, the impairment of assuming God is present only in what’s positive. But it’s only so that you can be here, now: fully rested, attentive and schooled in serene use of the spirit’s energy.
Right now, realize the degree to which, despite your best efforts, you’ve misdiagnosed things. Don’t let spiritual teachers tell you this, and don’t let their questioning of your responses become a way they exert control over you. Simply realize that there’s a part of you that panics, defers, and misdiagnoses what it sees–and that there could be a more skillful means of getting through the day. If you can hear and self-apply any of this, that’s ok. It’s totally safe, something that everyone under the sun has to contend with. Especially given the lack of clear rule books, it remains problematic for everyone. If you’d like to see clearly, what follows might clarify how that would look.
To begin, simply say “it’s not my fault, but it is my problem.” For instance: listen the next time you say “I feel anxious.” Without diminishing how hard that is, I’m asking you to consider whether “daily doses of creative tension as part of the way things are” wouldn’t be a better way of framing the psychological and physical sensations. Imitation of Christ is designed in a very particular way, so that psychological reframing at the service of serenity becomes our share in the way Jesus recapitulated and remade all creation. In other words, your happiness depends partly on viewing your suffering in ways that don’t, themselves, make it worse. If the Lord wants you to become aware of your nervous system, (and of the Spirit within) he’ll make your own calm rest on doing this exact kind of transformative work. That’s rough, but you’re not without a toolkit. Right now, breathe, listen and feel. Keep doing it, withdrawing attention and intention from everything but breathing, listening and feeling. Thoughts of self will eventually subside, and you’ll be a good bit calmer. If this happens while you’re at a pizza parlor, there will be two slices and a beer right in front of you when you realize you were never anywhere but in God’s kingdom.
Putting Prayer First
I am trying to teach you what happens when the Church’s prayer teaching is placed before all else. Perfect peace is all of your faculties at rest in oneness. The Mind of Christ is utterly empty: so was the Holy of Holies, and so, in the end, was the heart of Christ. Before humility renders the empty mind of Christ permanent, see, you will experience contemplation (a temporarily quiet mind, scattered by labeling) and obedience, (a quiet mind borne into responsibilities.) The somewhat frustrating alternations of prayerfulness and focus will teach you to part more instinctually with your torpor, to work and focus more naturally.
After a long time of imitating the Teacher, after a long time of inviting him into your every activity, thought and emotion, you may find yourself still anxious. You see, after imitation of Christ, after intimacy with Christ, there is the further step of internalizing Christ. If the Lord has withheld serenity, it may be because your mind and body, soul and nervous system are begging you to pursue recollection. Recollection, the in-gathering of the senses, is the discipline that makes Christ and his devotee entirely not-two. It also allows you to hear with your ears, not your mind, to see with your eyes, not your cravings, to feel with your hands, not your overextended nervous system. I’m trying to show you, in the end, that internalization of Christ through recollection is a larger piece of the apostolic tradition than you thought. And this is important not for the sake of intellectual awareness, but to turn the gifts of grace into a skillset of virtue. Counter-intuitively, recollection renders Jesus “invisible” just as the ascension did for the apostles. You see him in fewer places, think about him less. The saints bear witness: “on the mountain, nothing” is the end-game of “Christ has no body but yours, no hands but yours.” This is only so that, recognizing the limits of “self’s value” we can hear and feel without anxiety, make a decision to taste and see with gladness, though the reasons for dread remain.
Contemplation–stillness of mind and “just being with God”--is a tremendous grace. It’s not to be willfully grasped, but leaves us with a sense of how easy it would be to respond to God more fully than we are. Meditation–in the sense of “active thought about spirituality”--is so enticing a tool that, once implemented, is hard to know when to lay down. Vocal prayer can often feel like “words thrown at an abyss.” I mean for you to feel all these emotions–they’re a means of “throwing you back on yourself” so that when you come to yourself, you will return to the Father.
This process will teach you to focus your attention and intention–too often dissipated by the things of the world. Physical sensations, particularly those involved in the sacraments, will be a great help with this. Your willfulness will slowly be replaced by willingness, your “active volition” will become “passive volition” as you go from running the show to cooperating with others. You will withdraw your attention and intention from the many things among which they’re scattered–and you’ll do this hundreds of times a day–until sustained concentration is possible again.
There will be difficult bits. Tradition calls these the “dark nights”--it says there are two of them, though there may well be more. A dark night is simply an emptying-out of value. The dark night of the senses is no big deal–it’ll just take the things of the world and render them less distracting. (How often are you sitting at work, thinking of the beer that you’ll have after work, to the diminishment of productivity?) On the other side of the dark night of the senses, you’ll find yourself thinking of two things at once less often. And this will mean that expectations won’t bar you from accepting that what’s in front of you is Christ. Having learned to mentally let go of “what christ used to look like” you will find it much easier to accept, as a candidate for Christlikeness, the very unique stranger in front of you. The dark night of the senses is totally safe–though it will feel like an internal tempest in a teapot.
The dark night of the soul is necessary as well. Unfortunately, attachments to spiritual things, too, can also keep you from accepting or efficiently interacting with what’s in front of you. (How many priests, after quarrelling with their bishops, have distractedly crashed their cars because they were continuing the argument in their heads on the way to Mass?) The dark night of the soul feels terrible, but the end of its purifying work is effective focus.
A lesser-known third dark night, the dark night of the self, will show how unnecessary “the you doing the thinking” is. Indeed, the stresses of life are left in place, and life’s joys emptied of value, so that you might become Christ, so that the Christ within might hand all things over to the father–but the Christ within is a nobody, not a somebody, and “Father within” ultimately jumps the fence between inside and outside, becomes a lovingly impersonal sentience in which we live and move. And after all of that, your use of the senses is simply unimpeded by thought. In other words: in life, as in Elijah’s cave, there will be earthquakes, strong winds and fires, you will get over your self-story, and it’ll enable you to return to hearing the still small voice of God in silence.
The Teacher became flesh. Fully present in the moment, he was available to be the one who was sent. Honest reflection will teach you the degree to which you have not yet done this. How often do you find yourself thinking of two things at once? “The Word became flesh” has been distracted, in you, by your thoughts of the world. “Here I am” has been distracted by your attachment to things of the spirit. “Send me” has been distracted by a terribly inefficient and mentally abstracted facsimile of you. In the tradition of “paralysis by analysis,” that fakery prevented you from getting out the door. And so the words are for you: “Hear O Israel.” Write them on your doorposts, and get on with it.
Listening to Basic Human Needs, made holy in the sacraments
Even the wind says it: something had to transition you from listening to noise to listening for the Spirit, something had to internalize feeling so that it would grow ever subtler. Jacob’s ladder isn’t elsewhere, and it isn’t a dream. Ask your basic human needs, and they will tell you. You feel the precariousness of incarnating–pain and bliss, exhaustion and rest, sickness and wellness–and they speak with the spirit of fear. At best, that spirit tells you that “forming an ego is not necessary for survival.” You feel the desire for safety and it speaks with a spirit of knowledge. At best, that spirit tells you that “using the world for self-comfort is optional.” You feel a need for love and belonging–and it speaks with a spirit of might. At best, that spirit says “manipulating others into filling your needs is optional.” You feel a need for self-esteem and it speaks with a spirit of counsel. At best, it says “you who teach others, will you not teach yourself?” You will begin to develop a higher self with which to care for yourself and for others. And it will become your intuitive spirit of understanding, a voice behind you saying “this is the way, walk in it.” You will feel a need to self-actualize, and it will become a spirit of wisdom. At best, it says “Self adulation is optional. Godliness is a responsibility, and unconditionality is a source of quiet and solitude.” All of this was an expression of your need for God–and it will speak with the Spirit of the Lord, which says nothing at all. Free to perceive all things as they are–with restful breath, open ears, eyes that see instead of crave, hands that feel instead of grasp–you will be like Elijah, finally attuned to the absence of sound, covering his face at the mouth of the cave.
Take a lesson from the Sacraments: Breathe, Listen, and Feel. And when, through recollection, you come to yourself, taste and see God’s goodness. The Son of David is standing right in front of you, always: you have only to ask to see. The Teacher will touch your eyes as he has before, and this time I’m asking you to look intently, and see things as they are. You can handle your hunger with gluttony, but it will make you anxious. You can handle your desire for possessions and status with greed, but it will leave you a nervous wreck. You can handle your workload with sloth and your grief with sorrow, but it will leave you lazily skittish and resentful. You can handle your intimacy needs with lust and your anger with wrath, but the world will cooperate with your gross lack of subtlety only so far, and then you’ll have to face your attachment to remorse. You can handle yourself with vanity and pride, but putting yourself above others will be exhausting and the sound of your own voice will terrify you. You have been made for serenity and calm, and yet you act on thoughts that compromise them. In every moment, stop it. Please hear in my words both gentleness and, for Christ’s sake, insistence. Just as you have been everything, so have I–and I know how difficult all of this has been for you.
Keeping things simple requires conversion: the giving up of self and the quieting of judgment. When you find a way to just be, (while existing in a climate of scarcity and competition), you will have learned the lesson of Baptism. When you find a way simply to hunger, simply to grow, mature and find belonging, you will have learned the lessons of Eucharist and Confirmation. When you find a way both to give and receive love and serve without conditions, you will have learned the lessons of marriage and holy orders. When you stand in the wreckage that sin, aging and death leave in their wake, you will be open to the gift of reconciliation and annointing of the sick. You can have the sacraments without learning the lesson, and you can learn the lesson without having the sacraments–but I would have you make “growing in humility” as easy on yourself as possible–and holiness is part of the everything to which you’re called.
If our intimidating basic needs become the sacraments, then what today feels like a crisis will yield wisdom tomorrow. You’ll be forgiven your aversion response if Christ’s teaching methods leave you uncomfortable, but naming them is important. Jesus taught using overwhelm, scandal, condemnability and dissociation. Jesus said “let down the nets” to fishermen who’d worked fruitlessly all night. He said “eat my flesh and drink my blood” to a Jewish audience that knew cannibalism was, for Israel, a sign of desperation. He ministered among those who’d render him unclean. When he hung on the cross, it was for a crowd who thought that “cursed is anyone who hangs upon a tree.” And in his final moments, he gave up trying to inwardly manage himself, saying to God “into your hands I commend my spirit.” Christ’s methodology itself was rough. When you, his students have a predictably rough time, your lessons will be the dishonest wealth of crisis. They’ll only make sense on the other side of giving up self, when through a conversion experience the Spirit “gives you what is your own.”
Christ as True Nature, present in both attractions and aversions
Just as the Teacher hung between two thieves, you are suspended between contradictions. This is where the self dies. On the other side of a death of self: all places are here, all times are now, all people become Christ–who surrenders himself to the father leaving you at peace with yourself.
At the foot of the cross it was plainly visible. You were too used to “seeing as God” only what’s pleasant. The Teacher took away sin and left its effects in place as part of becoming all things you’re attracted and averse to. The hardest part of that was the bits that’d ping an aversion response. But you were as unwilling to let go of your attractions as you were unwilling to endure your aversions in the first place. If the Teacher is to be seen as he is, you will need either to muster a bit of fortitude–a necessary skill to sit the lessons of aversion–or you will need to develop the muscle of temperance–and the skills necessary for handling attraction, for “enjoying and letting go of impermanent things.”
When the teacher ascended, he became the true nature of all that is seen and unseen. The Teacher said “I in them and they in me, that they may be completely one.” He saw himself in strangers, the hungry, the homeless, the naked, the sick and imprisoned–groups that spike aversion responses, whose need is overwhelming–so that later, when the scales of ego and judgment fell from their eyes, they would cease to see the least among them and instead see God’s Christ. It taught them to obey the limits of their energy, to say no to what they must without judging it. This served to directly sustain them when they were asked to give beyond their capacity. Peter said “I don’t have silver or gold, but what I have, I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, get up and walk.” Listen to Cephas acknowledging, first, his limits. Listen to Peter naming the grace in which they stand. Listen to the command that forms as the invalid accepts that Christ’s power and his own are not two.
The Teacher said he was bread and wine for the hungry, sheep gates for an audience of shepherds, light for the blind and “the way” for those who are lost. So, later theologians will be forgiven when they say “God comes to meet you in every aspect of your daily responsibilities” and “abandon yourself to divine providence and everything that’s left will be God.” Saints have understandably said, of the material world, “I look at God, he looks at me.” For serenity’s sake alone, it’s rightly taught that “All that is, is Christ.”
Apostolic identification with Christ ran deeper than that. The apostles even stopped using physical sensations to tell a “self” story. Pain was the hardest to reframe–connected, as it was, to their capacity for self pity–but they’d eventually say all pain belonged to Jesus, and willingly, devotedly bear what they once judged and rejected. We can only see compassionately on the other side of encountering our blindness, so we must look deeply at our capacities for sin. This is the ‘suit of leaves’ that’s old as eden and our own emergence into consciousness–it’s the ego, the craving, the desire and attachment that once protected us and is now handing us over to satan for the destruction of our flesh.
Shadow work
Neither you, nor anyone else on earth, is exempt from encountering your shadow, from being sifted like wheat. Your own divine echo has this to say: you are all people, everything, always, and half of that is unflattering. You are Pharoah enslaving the israelites, king Nebuchadnezzar II throwing his own servants in the furnace. You are a Satan. The hardest part of praying a full psalter will always be realizing “I am a worm and not a man”--this will be among the many shades of dehumanizing emotions included in fulfilling the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms–and they’ll all be totally true of you. But do not despair, and do not crawl back into denial–everyone else feels all of this as well. When you have turned back, you must strengthen the others. At least half of being everything is not fun in the least; it is also totally safe.
Incarnating into a situation of scarcity and competition was a great source of Trauma. It’s almost fitting that, early on in life, the mind works in overdrive, the body stores trauma, the nervous system does its best to self-regulate. Later in life it’s typical for these coping strategies to prove inadequate.
If Christ is, simultaneously, our true self and every other sentient being that has ever existed, we are connected in his body to every other being that has ever lived. This means that the memory of having caused trauma is as alive in us as the memory of having alleviated it. Imitation of Christ means waking up gradually to how systemic and historical sin are, all of them, stored in every human body. It can beget more words than are useful: each disabled person is every disabled person, each sick person is every sick person, each rich person is every poor person. To keep it simple, there are no others, only mirrors of yourself.
To keep it sane, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not just different persons of a single divine nature, they’re the highest expression of your own ability to cope with, reframe and recapitulate suffering. God’s personality is a skillset for recapitulation, at the core of which is sitting still, seeing yourself as more malleable than the way things are. The Teacher said “blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.” The spiritual energies of grief are not different than those that underlie joy. The ‘you’ experiencing the energy is what’s changed.
This is true of the moral life as well. The “potential energy” in vice is quite the same as what fuels virtue. To access that, we need to be still enough not to act on every thought, watchful enough to evaluate thoughts for the emotional signature they leave behind, quiet enough to hear that emotions are verbal expressions of stored physical sensation, equanimous enough to commit to giving up the judgments we place on energy. When we have made a decision to accept all things as they are, we will have cared for the ailing tree of our own life from its roots.
I don’t need to tell you that this is an immense task. I don’t need to tell you it’ll take your whole life. You may even realize that you’ve lived myriad past lives, or that, in Christ, you are living all your possible lifetimes at once. (Stop wasting energy asking whether unity or multiplicity, resurrection or reincarnation are correct. Who is it that wants to be right?) At some point, you will look at everything that’s required of you, and decide to become the kind of person who can, through a mix of grace and hustle, handle it. You will lose nothing of what God has given you, but perhaps realize that the “self” that did the having is not as permanent as you thought. The Teacher is, was and will be a living sign that all of this is totally safe.
The Trinity Within
Your basic needs can sometimes seem a separate sentience, hyper-focused and “othered” within you. Compulsive thinking has a “mind of its own” such that the desert fathers called that mental capacity “demons.” Fair enough, following the promptings of compulsive thinking too often forms habit, and addiction. If the “othered sentience” of compulsive thought has a mind of its own, perhaps the “othered sentience” of your higher self has a mind of its own as well.
The Trinity is not remote, it dwells in you. How does your relationship with “the Christ within” begin, except with self care? When your responses to life are not an attempt to avoid suffering or judgment, when they’re not an effort to gain the approval of others, you will know what it means that the teacher “set his face like flint.” How does your relationship with the “Father within” begin, except with your own ability to meta-think, meta-emote and dispassionately self-observe? When you judge with the right judgment of compassion, you embody a part of the trinity–the lack of which creates suffering. How does your relationship with the Spirit within begin, except with the ability to sit in intense sensations until, in the stillness, a different range of options emerges for you? When you refrain from choosing, rather than choose a path of self-induced suffering, the spirit will rest and remain on you powerfully.
Your higher self must learn to effectively re-focus your attention and intention. Learn to question “created needs and dependencies.” Give them up–forever, if they’re truly harmful, but at least honestly and temporarily, to see what lacking them does to your emotional life. You have remained too long in the marketplace, and now your responses are mismatched. They played the flute for you, and you did not dance, they sang a dirge and you did not mourn. The willfulness with which you once accomplished tasks must be replaced with willingness to be a collaborative part of a whole. If you can briefly deploy attention and intention toward what alleviates suffering, the payback in serenity will be immense. And you will grow in empathy. You will learn to rejoice with those who rejoice, and mourn with those who mourn, and gradually become all things to all people. You are learning to be just as productive as before, but fueled by spirit and presence and grace instead of ego.
What you initially relate to as “other”--the dialogue becomes easier and faster. As you descend from intellect to intuition, the insights of that inner conversation become a deployable skill. Prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude are, all of them, psychological muscles, the lack of which will leave you quite anxious. Inner habit formation proceeds until your higher self, in fully aware ministry to the rest of you, becomes a persona of its own. Every muscle movement is a lifting of the cross or a shirking of a burden. Every mental move is either an embrace of the way things are or a denial of it. Eventually, the one who handles all this will simply be called “who you are.” For now, what better name could there be for this than “the Christ within?”
A constant dialogue of self-care, meta-thinking and subtle feeling will become part of how you relate to yourself. But that will also be how you keep “relating to the Triune God” rooted in the body. If you thank the Lord for bearing the pain of sin, you are also thanking your own ego, for handling the trauma of incarnating until you were ready to face it. If you thank God for his mercy, you’re also thanking “the observer” for being the “someone” who helps you continue to function long after “thoughts of self” have ceased. If you say “come holy spirit” you’re asking to be centered enough to feel the pressures associated with energy moving through the body–even as “breaking up tensions” is occasionally painful. You’re asking to sit in unpleasant sensation until the “you” doing the judging ceases to label the sensation. That will feel horrible, until the door of non-self opens. If there were a ‘you’ left to label it, it might be called bliss, but you will be too busy breathing, listening and feeling to bother doing so.
Do not do what “spiritual people do” and get caught in theories. Do not get caught in loops of theological thought whose pleasantness distracts you from trauma stored in the body. Do not begin to think that God’s graces make you better than those around you. Do not attribute the judgments you’ve been asked to cease making to Christ, so that your toxicity only continues, this time with spiritual sponsorship. The high points in an embodied spiritual journey do not excuse you from everything, and the Trinity blinks back at you from all that is seen and unseen. There isn’t a you to nurse attachments, or be better or worse than others. If the divine clarifies itself in you, it is for mercy, acceptance, nonjudgement and equanimity. Never for self-aggrandizement or rationalization. You will mishandle this a great deal, and when you have turned away from self-induced anguish, it will beget enormous gentleness.
“Christ as Self” is an Apostolic Teaching
You could continue to think that the self exists–that’s an option–but I would have you be free of all traces of remorse, resentment, and entitlement. And those will continue to cling until you wiggle out of the garment of self and run away naked. But if, instead you’d like to be capable of accepting all things, and free of all except the most temporary of fears, decide today that “all that is is Christ.” Decide to accept that unpleasant lessons must still be learned, that we must except how temporary our joys are too, and unclench every impulse to grasp.
At the beginning and the end, for St. Peter, there was a great catch of fish–only his questions and unwillingness, only the torn nets were absent from the second one. And whatever words were accepted as Christ’s Gospel in the first were accepted as such in the second even coming from the mouth of a stranger.
Listen to what the Gospel and the epistles say. The Teacher said “because I live, you also will live.” None of us lives to ourselves. We have died to ourselves and are alive to Christ. St. Paul said “My true self is hidden with Christ in God.” And “I live, but not I, Christ lives in me.” For the apostles, death and life had become the same. Paul said “for me, to live is Christ, to die is gain.” And even the sensations of the body have transformed. All sensation or emotions that we’re averse to have been transformed into the sufferings of Christ–and we work with them as sensations and emotions–as things that change and shift while we watch. Now, though, we can be devoted to them because they are a sign of Christ’s life in us: we need only hold them with proper care and mindfulness. The Teacher also said “The Father is always with me.” He went through a whirlwind of emotions “I am troubled now, but what should I say ‘father, save me from this hour?’ It was for this hour that I came into the world.” And he also said “Father, why have you forsaken me.” It isn’t just “proper” that students become like the teacher. It is an inevitable part of an incarnation, happening to all whether they like it or not.
What the Church looks like, in light of this
Remember that others and institutions should be left to do what they wish. However, if they assume their will and God’s are the same, and if they nurture a belief set that creates suffering, you’re well within your rights to declare them only as relevant as they are accepting, non-judgmental, and work for the reduction of suffering. Fairness and rightness unfortunately, here, takes a real back seat to power dynamics. In a world of egos, no action you could take would keep you safe from the possibility of judgment–though it may be false, you are liable to judgment by the mere fact that you’re alive. This won’t be comfortable, and that’s ok, it’s not supposed to be. When you forget, remind yourself: you are always both wrong and right at the same time. Do not seek righteousness, because that would remove you from the fellowship of the crucified Christ. Do what brings you peace if you can, make choices that minimize suffering, change what you can and do not worry about what you can’t.
Do not fear if the one who called you rejected you. You will be like the demoniac in the gospel who, healed by Jesus, is forbidden to get in the boat. You’ll go home with Christ’s call ringing in you ears, to “tell your family and friends all that the Lord, in his mercy, has done for you. This will beget the same grieving process that Maharajji, the Bhakti guru, initiated in his students. He said “give up anger, and tell the truth” and it triggered, in his devotee, a needed catharsis. Underneath anger, there will be sadness, and underneath sadness, acceptance. When Christ’s mercy is spoken of, the one who opens his mouth will be quite different than the one who went home to his loved ones.
You are to take teachings from everywhere. Monotheism was never rightly exclusive: it only became such because of the physical and cultural threat of the exile. Before the exile, Abraham not only gave the idolator Melchizedek a share with the people, but affirmed their common beliefs. When the Word became flesh, the Teacher not only learned from the Jewish Elders, he asked questions of them–despite the fact that many of the younger men present could later have been among those calling for his crucifixion. He affirmed the Canaanite woman, whose faith was part of what made healing possible. Pluralism is meant as a mirror. Do not avoid what you see there.
Do not assume that ideological or cultural differences are threatening, when they merely express different preferences than yours. Egoic defensiveness feels similar to a fight or flight reaction, but one comes from the head, the other, from the nervous system. It’s a mistake made often, and your serenity depends on avoiding it. The Church was never rightly exclusive: it only became so when it became a church of martyrs. Basic survival is the upper limit of judgment’s utility. Judgment is not designed to regulate what we ourselves haven’t the ability to change–including the choices or beliefs of others. Amen I say to you, for as long as “drive the evil from among you” and “judgment is excluded” can come mindlessly from the same mouth, the churches will be marred by spiritualized self-righteousness and its serenity will be threatened by the slightest differences. Take the log from your own eye, then you will see clearly. I say this to the shame of all people and to you, that all might be quiet and work on themselves. It is ok to admit that this is hard. If you fail to do it, at some point you must admit you prefer the comfort of being right to equanimity and your own serenity.
Religious people, who falsely claim that their carefully curated religious ideology is orthodoxy, will caution you against living only the parts of the truth that you prefer. They are correct: you are called to everything–but it will be the case that some of “everything” serves to humble you. Hedonism, relativism and spiritualized narcissism all leave anxiety in their wake, and adhering to any of them will wreck your serenity. You are to take teachings from everywhere, let go of pleasure, accept pain willingly, and convert no one but yourself. Be quiet, be hospitable to the Truth as others understand it. Sit with Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Atheists. Ask them questions driven by childlike fascination, like the teacher did with his elders.
Listen to Bishops and Cardinals, to homeless women and ice cream vendors. Take teachings from schismatic women priests, from corporate executives and from the dog excrement you step in on the way to meeting with them. Listen to protestants and evangelicals and mormons–but call judgment judgment, and mercy, mercy. If they have spoken wrongly, use it as energy to convert yourself. But when they speak rightly, testify to the right. Do not correct in others what you have left unconfronted in yourself.
Humanists and Transcendentalists will speak truth, and Satanists will run soup kitchens better than Christians do, just to irk them. The Eucharist was a scandal from beginning to end, and many abandoned Christ when he told the crowds consuming his body was a mandate. Correct the scandal you find in yourself, and that alone: if you require mercy, extend it to others. Do not discount what is beautiful, though it comes from an unfamiliar source. Backsliding into judgment would be heaping hot coals of anxiety on your own head, and I would rather your life be more serene.
I am trying to focus you on the parts of the Tradition that reduce ego–things that can serve as handholds when other people manifest their shadow. Christ is before all else that is, the firstborn of the dead–do not be surprised if it is only in him that you’re able to hold it together, however barely. But even the Teacher, led by the Spirit, emptied himself. Even God’s Christ, faced with his suffering, surrendered his spirit to the Father. Even Jesus accepted sadness and pain when “the way things are” dictated it. In this way, by becoming sin, he fulfilled the call to everything. Our serenity depends on doing the same, and if you find that difficult, that is ok. Ego death is hard, and you are having an exactly right response to a difficult situation.
Give up self, do not judge. If you’re thorough, what’s left will be the Trinity made manifest. Imitate the teacher, intimately let him enter every thought, action, and choice you make. When a nobler self arises in you, know that only by calling it what it is, “Christ within” will it remain healthy. When you have internalized him, you will see him no longer, but you will see without craving, hear with your ears, feel with your hands–the knowledge of “who it is who is seeing” will be certain. The wisdom teaching of the Church is not a secret knowledge. The development of the higher self into Christ awakens capacities all people have: to meta-think and meta-emote, to reframe thinking. And those open doors in two directions. Your own being will echo the Father when you self observe with compassion. Your own being will echo the Spirit when you experience the difference between the different layers of your embodied existence–and you will watch yourself treat our experience with increasingly speedy equanimity. You will enjoy things you’re attracted to, and let them go. You will prepare yourself to experience things you’re averse to–and though aversions can’t be expected to do much else than feel bad, we find that those, too, transform over time.
Taught by the sacraments, formed by meditation and contemplation, you will now learn from all of life. You will remember it is always safe to honestly admit your faults–you’ll see that it limits the creation of habit, the proliferation of ego, resentment and remorse. You are on the hook for the consequences of your actions, and every desire you act on willfully is fulfilled at a cost to your peace. If you experience consolations in prayer, you will rely on life’s sufferings to balance them out, to assist you in letting go of even the ways psychological selves echo divinity. Like the Teacher, you will empty yourself, making yourself a servant of the way things are.
With the higher self, as with the lower self, there are pitfalls. After you have cared for your own wounded ego, avoiding resentment and remorse will depend on following Christ. You’re physically, psychologically designed for this work. Do it so that you can minimize self-induced suffering. When you see the ways your own being echoes the divine, avoiding entitlement, avoiding the assumption that your God’s judgments and your own are the same–these are the key to minimizing anxiety. Do not imagine the pleasant parts of the spiritual life make you better than others. Do not use the pleasant parts of the spiritual life to end-run around unfaced trauma. The Christ you are becoming is a nobody, not a somebody. Use the higher self to correct the lower self, use the non-self to correct the higher self, use the observer to let go of it all, then listen to the wind.
Carry yourself in silence. The events of the day will come, one after another. Deal quickly with them and release them. Sit in quiet for a small interval each day–morning and evening, if you can. And if that initiates a tremendous and difficult surfacing of your own psychological hang ups, breathe, listen, and feel. Read scripture with one eye on the page, and one on your reactions to it: remember, there are no “others” only mirrors of yourself. All times are now, all people are you, all places are here, all opposites are relativized, and all potential is realized. Read the psalter, find the lines that name what you’re feeling, and treat them like footsteps that bear you through the day. If thoughts about self cease–even if it happens through dissociation, overwhelm, scandal, or condemnation, (fair or unfair) let those thoughts go.
Decide to know nothing but Christs crucified. Decide to become the kind of person that can handle stress, rather than busying yourself trying to remove or reduce the stress.The mind of Christ begets unconditionality, and the ability to bear unequal or undeserved weight is the fruit of being suspended on the Cross. Affirm others, without hoping to be affirmed. Give without grasping, desire God’s will alone–because only by wanting what God wants on his timeline and terms will your desire be free of clinging.
Breathe, listen and feel, taste and see with focused attention and intention, using physical sensation to ground yourself in equanimity. Note what you’re attracted to or averse to, realizing that Christ is manifest in all of it. To prepare yourself for Christ’s presence in aversion, flex the muscles of virtue. To prepare yourself for Christ’s presence in attraction, practice enjoying, indulging limitedly, and letting go.
Take a lesson from the beloved disciple, inquiring of Christ as to who would betray him: the part of you that is waiting for the other shoe to drop, that’s waiting for something to go wrong, will never cease. The part of you that has the potential to mishandle grace may not be eliminated. A great number of saints only grew in awareness of their sins as their lives progressed. God’s grace wasn’t in sin’s elimination, but the ability to bear, with Christ, the deepening awareness of their intractability. At the risk of eisegesis–for which we’re all “judgeable at most”-- Christ says to all of us “if it is my will that [the ego] remain until I return, what is that to you? Come follow me.” This, too, is part of fulfilling the scriptures.
I will tell you a mystery: there are no others. Where can heaven and hell be, if not here? Who can be God or Satan except you? There is no future and there is no past. The Lord is not slow to act, as some think of slowness. Instead, he is patient. Your superego and the communal superego may transact shame and judgment, but that’s no reason to avoid healthy repentance as you understand it. The second coming is not at the end of the world, either. It happens when you realize that the world is a part of you, that your own consciousness is contained in the world. No less than this happened with the Teacher. Who are the only candidates for embodying him except those who make themselves students of everything, who say “here I am.” When that is you, know that “here and now” is a place where you’re most welcome: grace, providence and the Spirit have made it that way, so that you can feel both truly empowered and as safely disempowered as the Teacher was. Just as the apostles would be given everything they renounced plus persecutions, you, too, will cease to want some things for the sake of embracing everything.
Before the quiet mind of Christ, chop wood and carry water. After the mind of Christ, chop wood and carry water. In moments of depression, the scriptures said “get up and eat, lest the journey be too much for you.” Now I say to you, “on the mountain, they beheld God, and they ate and drank.” If you’ve become able to hear the question, “is the one who chews the same as the one who is swallowed up,” then your victory is real. What was said to Peter is said of you “when you have turned back, you must strengthen the others.” For God’s sake, go find them!
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