Christ's prayer: When oneness blinks first

In the gospels, we see Jesus going off to pray, then teaching the crowds. With due respect to divine mystery--too often used to explain gaps in understanding--better work could be done connecting the dots between Jesus' prayer times and the things he taught. Of course we risk isogesis, but for a moment, let's be brash enough to ask "why did Christ teach as he did" and let's be generous with acceptance when the lesson costs us our misconceptions.  What do we know about Jesus' prayer practice?  And more importantly, if we come to understand it from the inside out, can we allow (to exist in us) the same vulnerabilities that made Christ raise mind, heart and voice to the Father?  God willing, for those that keep reading, the heart will answer. [bxA]

We know that Jesus refused to use "this is my beloved son" as a pathway to control.  Psalm 2 says "ask and I will bequeath you the nations...with a rod of iron you will break them"--and Jesus most likely intuited that "if fulfillment involves being violent, you're being bamboozled by ego." In his refusal to bow down to Satan in exchange for the kingdoms of the earth, Jesus knew viscerally what God was saying to him in Psalm 2's last line, "I have said 'you are my son,' it is I who have begotten you this day."  Jesus would later say "The law, the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled,"--and if Christ let go of his divine sonship, we'd be forgiven for guessing that, for us as well, "self-emptying" is a core aspect of that fulfillment.  

We know that Jesus quotes psalm 22, which says "why have you forsaken me"--and that this psalm also says "I can count all my bones."  So pain and trauma--just as much as blissful altered states of consciousness--can fragment a psyche, make a person hypersensitive to physical feeling.  We know that, in order to let go of thought, Jesus used the tools for nervous system regulation that are built into Israel's God concept.  Jesus breathed (Moses taught that the name of God was the spelling of a breath cycle.)  Jesus listened (Elijah kept listening until fire, wind and earthquake--as well as his own pious self-story--went quiet.) Finally, Jesus felt the sensations of the body (Ezekiel's dry bones, where he prophesied to the flesh and the breath, this vision at least testified a need to troubleshoot our "self talk" which Jesus would have felt along with everyone else.)   

We know that, at times, Jesus was so busy LIVING that "self" fell away.  He kept looking, but didn't comprehend; he kept listening but didn't understand.  This was dissociative, and dissociation became material for self-emptying.  At times dissociation felt negative--Christ's disciples would describe him, quoting the psalm that said "I am a worm and not a man."  At times it felt numb--Jesus died abandoned by his disciples, and the same mouth that prayed "you have taken away my friends" also said "I have born your trials, I am numb."  But dissociation was never meant to remain negative--the suffering servant, perhaps more than others, would have appreciated the line "let me hear rejoicing and gladness, that the bones you have crushed may thrill."  The SELF that grasped for control or security by labelling or examining sensory phenomena--this is something Jesus became increasingly able to let go of.  Christ got to a point where he could invite Thomas to inflict pain on him by probing his wounds.  That shows Christ was grounded in the body whether or not it was pleasant.  And that letting go allowed him to handle his attractions and aversions with ever increasing ease, to accept the range of emotions involved in becoming everything.

Prayer was "watching and waiting" while focused on negative space.  (This is why St. John Vianney could later say, of adoring the Eucharist, "I look at him, he looks at me.") Waiting for a "figure ground reversal"--the perspective shift when the background becomes foreground--this reveals that "God's sentient mystery lives in the world as well as in us." All of the metaphors about the bridegroom coming when you least expect him, or the master coming at a late hour to virgins with untrimmed wicks--these are exhortations to maintain attention and intention in a state of basic readiness for the moment when the internal energy shifts on its own.  And not only that, the source of those energy shifts is "other, intelligent, transcendent."  This is why it was God's doing when, on the cross, instead of being judgmental, Jesus said "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Consciousness, before being surrendered, expands.  The teacher  saw himself in everything, and everything in himself.  He was in bread, wine, light, vines, shepherds sheep gates.  He was in the poor, the stranger, the hungry the homeless, the sick the imprisoned.  This palpable sense of "consciousness outside himself" enabled him to abandon himself completely to the unknown--especially when the suffering of the cross led Jesus to pray "into your hands I commend my spirit"---to a father who had just been asked "why have you forsaken me." Jesus' trust was only as real as God's apparent absence was palpable.

We know that he experienced both bliss and pain in his body, and that he increasingly bucked preference and allowed "what is" to exist.  Not only did he say both "I am troubled now, but what should I say?" and "it was for this hour that I came into the world."  He also said "Let this cup pass from me" but also "Thy will be done."  Preference and choice, being subject to judgment--these are all functions of an ego that we spend a lifetime becoming aware and letting go of.  To endure the effects of an ego you've ceased to identify with is a very loving gesture.  So Jesus taught "give up self, take up your cross, and follow" as well as "do not judge lest you be judged."  But that didn't excuse him from self, and it doesn't excuse us.  To us, regarding ego, Jesus said "If it is my will that he tarry till I return, what is that to you?"  It's also to us that he says "come follow me," so we'd better, for Godsakes, get on with it.

For Jesus, prayer was not intellectual or driven by reason.  It was intuitive, driven by realization at the prompting of the spirit.  The teacher said "the Spirit blows where it wills, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes."  Long before the famous mystic (known simply as "the cloud author") spoke of surrendering everything to the cloud of unknowing, Jesus' prayer life was unafraid of "not knowing."  Indeed, it goes deeper than that: believers felt safe saying things like, "I believe, help my unbelief" in part because Christ, within each individual and in the Christian community, took on the johanine moniker--he embodied the title of "one in your midst whom you do not know."  It's "the unknown humble one" who, within us and in community, is capable of being, doing, praying when our groans are too deep for words. When Jesus says "return to me" and "remain in me" he's asking us to get grounded in the body enough to accept that, within each of us, unknowing is a persona, and for each of us, humility is acquaintance with that persona.

Finally, the disciples understood that Jesus relativizes identity.  Paul said "I live, but not I, Christ lives in me."  Regarding the difficulties of "letting go of attractions and accepting aversions," Paul reminds us that "sensations don't belong to us."  Physical feelings belong to Christ, they aren't material for an ego story.  The epistles say each believer is "always carrying in the body the death of Christ, so that the life of Christ may be made known in our mortal bodies also."  When Theresa of Avila said "Christ has no hands but yours" the hearts of believers swelled with positive feeling.  The scandal is this: we default to assuming believers will play host, bodily, to the bliss of charity.  But believers' bodies are also the only place Christ can feel anger, anxiety, nervousness, and pain.  Christ's sacrifice is perpetuated, not just in the heavenly inner life of some circular dance of trinitarian functions, but in our nerve endings themselves.  The good news is contingent on acceptance: If we can allow the discomfort of it, we'll live, move and have our being in God.  If we can let go of the bliss, allow prophesies and tongues and knowledge to cease; when love is everything that's left, everything seen and unseen will be Christ-made-present. 

Egos masquerade behind many necessary roles.  Each believer can rightly say "my name is Legion, for we are many."  Martha was told "you are worried about many things."  The adulterous woman's sins were, at worse, as numerous as her judges.  Even when Peter, James and John wanted to make three tents at the Transfiguration, they did not know what they were saying.  Christ says "there is need of only one thing" and again "sit here while I pray." By and by, the cloud of concerns will dissipate, and its host of fears with it: Christ alone is the prayer.  Being, doing, knowing are completely one in him, and he can only be here, now, in all creation and in his people.

Oneness is Christ, and Christ is oneness.  He must increase, we must decrease.  It is worth the silencing of tongues, even when they're ours.

Paradox as Real Presence

The embodiment of paradox is the word becoming flesh.  In total acceptance of paradox, your body and every body becomes Christ.  Everything is Christ and Christ is everything--rooted in the body, the way to realize this is to become nothing and nobody. In Christ, the one who said "I AM" also said "give up self" and "do not judge."  We encounter Christ as really present when we empty ourselves as he did: we can work, think and be compassionate without being a self.  Accepting suffering and letting go of bliss, accepting that both pain and pleasure are temporary, we become a union of being and nonbeing, self and non self, word and silence, knowing and unknowing.  Now it only remains for our cranky minds, our impulsive emotions and our disregulated nervous systems to adjust.  This is why everything in the law, the prophets and the psalms--though everything that's written describes Christ--can be fulfilled only in the here and now, and in us.  [bxA]

The Teacher said "Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst." And this is important: you will never know what this means until the "me" (of whom you ask what this means) is your flesh, your breath, your thoughts and emotions, sensations and energies.  Only the paradox of "emptiness and fullness," kenosis and pleroma, will root you in incarnation so deeply as to heal your emotions, nervous system, attention and intention.  Only when there is no you will the paradox of "facing wounds to find healing" be totally safe.  Tradition says Thomas looked a great deal like Jesus--so that when Christ appeared with open wounds, Thomas would more easily see his own.  We are no different.  That's a consolation, but it also challenging the ego--which only wants lasting pleasure--with the truth that "all flesh is like the grass."

To hunger without fear is Christ, and nourishment.  Because he who said "I am the bread of Life" also said "Man cannot live on bread alone." When you are able to say both and also feel and let go of all the sensations of the body, Christ is present as your own non-self.  To thirst without insecurity is Christ, and "true drink."  The one who said "eat my flesh and drink my blood" also said "I thirst."  When you can look at unmet thirsts and be unafraid, Christ is present as your own non-self. To become comfortable with insecurity, embrace "knowing/not knowing." Become the one who said "I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified."  To gain comfort with lack of control, embrace "believing/unbelieving." Keep saying to Christ "I believe, help my unbelief" until unbelief totally loses its notes of cynicism.  Belief will cease to be an intellectual thing, and become a process of arriving at total acceptance.

The body is a gateless gate, though it appears to be a prison.  When we realize this, we live and move, have our being in God, and Christ is truly present.  We sit, like the apostles, singing hymns.  The feeling of sound is enough: if our attention is sustained enough, we'll witness the falling away even of the mental voice that refers to "I, Me, and My."  Then the doors will swing open on their own.

It's of the ego that Christ spoke paradoxically, when he said both "if it is my will that he remain until I return, what is that to you" and also "nothing is lost but the one destined to be lost."  This tension--which is not "you," though it claims to be--remains so we'll let go of self, surrendering even the separation between ourselves and Christ.  The ego is the prison guard, who awoke to find all the prison doors open, and drew his sword to kill himself.  The ego is the one to whom Peter said "do not harm yourself, for we are all still here."  Egos expect benefits to following Christ, only to hear him add "persecutions" to the benefits package of discipleship.  

If we are rooted in the body more than in the mind, we will be okay.  Christ has lost nothing of what the Father has given him, and when he uses our mouths to say "into your hands I commend my spirit," we sit clothed and in our right mind, and Christ has no body but ours to sit still in.  Neither pain nor bliss, nor calm nor stress--none of this is ours to build an ego story out of.  It all belongs to Christ.  He is the firstborn of the dead, and death isn't expected to be anything but painful, grumpy, uncomfortable.  There will be reasons to flip tables.  Neither the body nor the temple were ever meant to be a vessel of stored trauma that substitution sacrifice made them into.  Go ahead and lose your shit.  All shit belongs to Christ, anyway.  When you think, who do you think you are?  Wouldn't "not thinking" be more peaceful? If the answer is yes, then "breathe, listen and feel": the alpha and the omega is embodied and within you, and birth and death are one.  Our help is in the name of the Lord, and the name of the Lord is Silence.

Anger and Enlightenment

Jesus learned that pain just as much as bliss could open the mind to the Trinity within. when the temple was desecrated by the transactionality of the money, changers, his own nervous system knew the lesson before his mind did. When you make something holy (a dove, two pigeons, a lamb, a temple, a human body) when you make any of these a receptacle for trauma, it is stored in the nervous system down the generations. When Jesus flipped the tables, it was because his body remembered every act of substitution sacrifice throughout history. Even, before his mind grasped what it was to be the suffering servant, his body knew. He lost his composure because losing composure is an appropriate response to a bad situation. [bxA]


Trauma creates us into dissociated people who become hyper focused, and stuff their feelings. But the ego becomes the receptacle of all of those unfazed emotions, and it is later the ego that becomes like Christ, in is deeply present to all who suffer. Not only does this show the genius of the mind, the limbic system, the nervous system, it also becomes the foundation of of Christian enlightenment. Once you dissociated involuntarily to survive. Now dissociate voluntarily to form your soul into Christ.

On humble desire

First we say, let it be done to me according to your word. And that’s overwhelming, because God’s word is everything, not just some things. God’s word teaches us to pay attention to the quality of impermanence: it’s both “letting go of pleasure” and “steeling yourself for aversion.” Each has their way of conveying God’s real presence. It’s just–we’ll miss it if we fail to learn to let go and steel ourselves. The lesson is held in trust until we learn the skill. [bxA]

Next we say “I want to see.” Only when we realize we’re blind, that we’d miss the messiah standing right in front of us; only then does this come out of the depths. And even then, maybe our eyes, when they open, open only just a little. We end up saying “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.” A further touch from Jesus is necessary to see things as they are.

Egos want things to be exclusively pleasant. When we run into our non-self, who is the “Christ within” then he himself provides a way of wanting everything. When his words “if this cup cannot pass unless I drink it, thy will be done”--when these words come from your mouth as if they are your own, then you learn why preference, choice, and judgment can be harmful. As you learn this, ego loosens its grip.

Ego is a muscle of survival, not a muscle of adaptability or thriving. All day you are surrounded by somebodies, saying “here he is” and “there he is.” Do not go off in pursuit. After a while all those somebodies prove shifty, die off. Within and without, things get very quiet. Luckily, amidst your crowd of thoughts, there is one who embodies full acceptance. He is you, but he is not the “you” that’s familiar. He is a nobody, not a somebody, and he’s calling you to become nobody as well.

“The Word/Silence paradox is a person, and he is within you.” This is a hard saying, but true. The blind man, who didn’t know his healer because the latter had escaped into the crowd of thoughts, was asked “do you believe in the son of Man?” and he responded, “Who is he, sir, tell me so that I may believe in him.” The healer said “I am the one who is speaking to you.” The message: when quiet is so deep that it moves inside you and speaks, when absence, gazing back at you, blinks first. Even after everything else is silent, what speaks in that silence is Christ incarnate. And this can be anything. The sound of the wind, the pop of rain on a copper roof: anything you hear with the open ear of selflessness, instead of an ear closed by ego. After silence, what’s left is Christ.

Christ is nobody, silence enfleshed. He does nothing, has nothing to offer. But he takes that and multiplies it: all this means is “becoming nobody is totally safe and healthy.” To him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. Blessed are those who take no offense.

Christ has no tantrum but yours

Everyone likes Theresa of Avila's statement that "Christ has no body now but yours, no hands but yours." It's flowery, beautiful, and fills people with positive feeling. But the fact is, the same is true of things that cause an aversion response: Christ has no disregulated nervous system but yours, no pain receptors but yours, no veins but yours to pop out while angrily flipping tables. Christ has no tear ducts but yours to cry tears of blood later, after embarrassingly losing it--publicly and for good reason. [bxA]

Ekhart Tolle spoke of a pain body. Bessel VanderKolk spoke of the body storing trauma. The internet is full of five minute videos about befriending your nervous system. None of this is false: the whole world is shouting out in the street, that the one who bears your sins, who lives, suffers, dies and rises--your own "non-self"--is within you.

Of the dry bones in need of prophecy, the prophet Ezekiel was told "These bones are the whole house of Israel." Christ has no body but yours in which to fulfill the law, the prophets and the psalms, so in reality the one to whom we speak of relaxed flesh and calm breath is ourselves. As he did with Legion, he waits humbly for you to stop living in the world like it's a tomb, to drop the rocks with which you judge and gash yourself, to sit still, clothed and in your right mind.

I will tell you a mystery: you, me and everything else, we are all the messiah. And it's not a big deal.  The only reason strangers, the hungry, the homeless the imprisoned couldn't be the Christ is because we had expectations about how "the one who is to come" would look and act. Christ came so we'd jettison the ideas that keep our eyes from seeing, in what's right in front of us, the living Word. He overtly said he was the sheep gate, the shepherd, he said he was bread and wine and light and the Way. And he wasn't being metaphorical. The messiah is now the true nature of all that is seen and unseen. The real kicker (and the thing that'll really stretch you) is that he's also dog shit, the one cursed and crucified; he is the dirt and the one who falls three times in it, bearing unmerited weight.

This is so that we'll wake up and realize we expected God to be exclusively pleasant--so we'll arise from sleep and realize how safe it is to be entirely wrong. If God is what is pleasant, then those pleasures are like the flowers of the field. We simply have to learn to let go. If God is what's painful and unpleasant, it's totally safe. We simply have to learn the right situations and times in which to set our faces like flint, to give our backs to those who beat us, to realize that egos don't stop being egos even for the righteous--not just the guilty, but also the innocent can be judged, should a time come when the unjust are granted power. And it's all ok. It'll be wounding, but we'll become mindful of our vulnerabilities, quiet, careful to read the spirit before we speak or act.

So what's to be done with mind, body, nervous system? Be still, and you will know--but not before your life becomes the purgatory intended for all the saints. You will see your survival needs, and the eight manipulations the mind devises to suffice them. (You have heard "gluttony greed sloth sorrow lust wrath vanity, and pride are sinful. Amen I say to you, they are merely distractions--simply shift your attention to the sensations of the body, and you'll be ok.") Even after you have awakened, you will see your frustrated higher aspirations lay bare other compulsive thoughts. (You haven't heard "self-pity, shame blame remorse rationalization resentment self-aggrandizement entitlement"--Amen, I say to you nonetheless--these will emerge even after you've awakened.  Simply shift your attention to the sensations of the body, and they will pass.)

Breathe, Listen and Feel--keep doing it until even thoughts of self go away.  At first, this will feel dissociative--sometimes negative, sometimes neutral, eventually positive enough to be preferred to a life of craving and attachment.  This is awakening is a preparation for the empty mind of Christ.  Let go of action, thought, emotion, sensation, and the judgments you place on energy. You are already deeply alive, but you are not justified in perpetuating an ego story. It is Christ within you living dying and rising. It has been this way the whole time, and you are only just now learning to focus your attention and intention so you can see it.

Emily Dickinson can say "I’m a nobody who are you are you a nobody too" and we call it poetry and immortalize it in anthology for all to read. Christ can say "you are in fact not who you think you are at all. That one is entirely insignificant, more a worm than a person." But, at this, we lose our minds. Of course, losing our minds is the point. And worms, themselves, have a gospel to preach. You see, the worm never dies, just like the divinity whose echoes animate our decaying flesh. We will not all die, but we will be changed along with whatever faith, hope and love remains to us. It is totally safe, totally cool, totally gross and unpleasant.

Christ, you see, didn’t come to only live life‘s prettier bits. He came to be everything. The day is dawning, and the light is breaking for each of us. The silence says it, over and over, if we only learn to listen. Remaining me. Return to your family and friends and tell them all that the Lord in his mercy has done for you. Go and do likewise. Answer for yourself: whose ears were these words meant to open?