"In Jesus, God took human form, human face, human eyes, and human endearment; God is finally someone we could fall in love with."
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
The Legend of St. Francis: 4. Miracle of the Crucifix (fresco detail). 1297-99, Giotto di Bondone, Upper Church, San Francesco, Assisi, Italy.
"Incarnation: A Franciscan View"
"Jesus Is InterFace with God "
Wednesday, 3 June 2015
Franciscan spirituality emphasizes the imitation and love of the humanity of Jesus, not just worshipping his divinity. We recognize how humble and human Jesus was, which makes him imitable for us. Doing what he taught--"Follow me"--might actually be possible! Francis' earnest desire was to be like Jesus; his simple rule for the Franciscans was "To follow the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ and to walk in his footsteps."
God as Trinity validates the Transpersonal level ("Father"), the Personal level ("Jesus"), and the Impersonal level ("Holy Spirit") of God-experience. They are all true--God as "I," God as "You," and God as "That," which is full mystical experience. But most people begin at the personal level. You can't fall in love with a concept, a moral force, high vibrational energy, or consciousness itself. God raised up Jesus and made him the Christ (Acts 2:32, 36). Jesus revealed in human form the incarnation of God, the union of the spiritual and the material, which has been true for about 14 billion years. In Jesus, God took human form, human face, human eyes, and human endearment; God is finally someone we could fall in love with. God was given a face and a heart in Jesus.
The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) said the only thing that really converts people at a deep level is seeing "the face of the other." Receiving and empathizing with the other leads to transformation of the whole person. This exchange is prepared to transform both persons--the seer and the seen. According to Levinas, the face of the other, especially the suffering face of another person, creates a moral demand on your heart and your mind that is far more compelling than the Ten Commandments. Just giving people commandments doesn't change the heart. It may steel the will, but it doesn't change the heart.
So many Christian mystics talk about falling in love with the face of Jesus. The mystical encounter is not just cerebral, analytic, or morally correct; it actually is an I-Thou encounter. There is no doubt that this was the experience of both Clare and Francis, and I think this is why Clare uses the word "mirroring" so much. You are mirrored not through concepts, but through faces. I know there have been moments in my life with a confessor or a therapist where I have come in hating myself, as we Enneagram Ones are very prone to do. When I dared to look up at the face of the therapist or the confessor, they were smiling at me--giving me the face that I couldn't give myself.
You can't mirror yourself. If you are a loving person today, you likely received a loving look from your mother and your father in the first years of your life. That is the initial mirroring, the template that some say we seek for the rest of our life: someone delighting in us with the pure freedom with which our mother and father first delighted in us. If you did not experience such loving gazes from your parents, I hope you have found other compassionate people or creatures to show you your own belovedness. Only then are you prepared to pass the mystery on. You can only give away what you have received, and in fact you must pass it on or you cannot and will not keep it.
Adapted from Franciscan Mysticism: I Am That Which I Am Seeking, disc 3 (CD, MP3 download)
Gateway to Silence: The Christ is everywhere.
"Emancipation happens when our contemplative journey takes us
beyond ourselves into care for all. . . ."[Simone Campbell]
Explore the various meanings of liberation--inner, outer, personal, economic, structural, and spiritual--in this new issue of Oneing.
Contributors include: Richard Rohr, Ilia Delio, Simone Campbell,
Timothy Shriver, Paula D'Arcy, Mirabai Starr, and others
Order at store.cac.org
Center for Action and Contemplation
cac.org
Center for Action and Contemplation
1823 Five Points Road. SW (physical)
PO Box 12464 (mailing)
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87195 United States
____________________________
Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Thursday, 7 May 2015 - Richard Rohr's Meditation: "Wrestling with Our Demons in Our Solitude"
"In the tradition of Moses and Jesus, the Christians who wandered into the desert entered a wild, fierce, unknown place where they would encounter both "demons" and "angels" (Mark 1:13)--their own shadowy selves which contained both good and evil, both gold and lead."
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Desert image by JeongJunYou.
"The Desert Fathers and Mothers"
"Wrestling with Our Demons in Our Solitude"
Thursday, 7 May 2015
The trouble--and the opportunity--in solitude is that there is no one around to blame for our moods and our difficulties. We are stuck with ourselves. Belden Lane helps clear away any romanticism we might associate with desert spirituality: "[The] desert is, preeminently, a place to die. Anyone retreating to an Egyptian or Judean monastery, hoping to escape the tensions of city life, found little comfort among the likes of an Anthony or a Sabas. The desert offered no private therapeutic place for solace and rejuvenation. One was more likely to be carried out feet first than to be restored unchanged to the life one had left." [1]
In the tradition of Moses and Jesus, the Christians who wandered into the desert entered a wild, fierce, unknown place where they would encounter both "demons" and "angels" (Mark 1:13)--their own shadowy selves which contained both good and evil, both gold and lead. In Belden Lane's words, "Amma Syncletica refused to let anyone deceive herself by imagining that retreat to a desert monastery meant the guarantee of freedom from the world. The hardest world to leave, she knew, is the one within the heart."[2]
A story from the desert fathers illustrates that even in the desert there is no escaping your own habitual responses: "A brother was restless in the community and often moved to anger. So he said: 'I will go and live somewhere by myself. And since I shall be able to talk or listen to no one, I shall be tranquil, and my passionate anger will cease.' He went out and lived alone in a cave. But one day he filled his jug with water and put it on the ground. It happened suddenly to fall over. He filled it again, and again it fell. And this happened a third time. And in a rage he snatched up the jug and broke it. Returning to his right mind, he knew that the demon of anger had mocked him, and he said: 'Here am I by myself, and he has beaten me. I will return to the community. Wherever you live, you need effort and patience and above all God's help.' And he rose up, and went back."[3]
Belden Lane writes: "The desert monks were hardly naïve despisers of culture. What they fled with greatest fear was not the external world, but the world they carried inside themselves: an ego-centeredness needing constant approval, driven by compulsive behavior, frantic in its effort to attend to a self-image that always required mending."[4] Ironically, in the fleeing they ran smack dab into the very thing they sought to avoid. As Pogo said in his comic strip, "We have met the enemy, and he is us"!
Gateway to Silence: Lead me into the wilderness of silence and simplicity.
References:
[1] Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford University Press: 1998), 165.
[2] Ibid., 168.
[3] Owen Chadwick, ed., trans., Western Asceticism (The Library of Christian Classics, Ichthus Edition: The Westminster Press, 1958), 92.
[4] Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, 166.
Center for Action and Contemplation
cac.org
Center for Action and Contemplation
____________________________
Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Thursday, 7 May 2015 - Richard Rohr's Meditation: "Wrestling with Our Demons in Our Solitude"
"In the tradition of Moses and Jesus, the Christians who wandered into the desert entered a wild, fierce, unknown place where they would encounter both "demons" and "angels" (Mark 1:13)--their own shadowy selves which contained both good and evil, both gold and lead."
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Desert image by JeongJunYou.
"The Desert Fathers and Mothers"
"Wrestling with Our Demons in Our Solitude"
Thursday, 7 May 2015
The trouble--and the opportunity--in solitude is that there is no one around to blame for our moods and our difficulties. We are stuck with ourselves. Belden Lane helps clear away any romanticism we might associate with desert spirituality: "[The] desert is, preeminently, a place to die. Anyone retreating to an Egyptian or Judean monastery, hoping to escape the tensions of city life, found little comfort among the likes of an Anthony or a Sabas. The desert offered no private therapeutic place for solace and rejuvenation. One was more likely to be carried out feet first than to be restored unchanged to the life one had left." [1]
In the tradition of Moses and Jesus, the Christians who wandered into the desert entered a wild, fierce, unknown place where they would encounter both "demons" and "angels" (Mark 1:13)--their own shadowy selves which contained both good and evil, both gold and lead. In Belden Lane's words, "Amma Syncletica refused to let anyone deceive herself by imagining that retreat to a desert monastery meant the guarantee of freedom from the world. The hardest world to leave, she knew, is the one within the heart."[2]
A story from the desert fathers illustrates that even in the desert there is no escaping your own habitual responses: "A brother was restless in the community and often moved to anger. So he said: 'I will go and live somewhere by myself. And since I shall be able to talk or listen to no one, I shall be tranquil, and my passionate anger will cease.' He went out and lived alone in a cave. But one day he filled his jug with water and put it on the ground. It happened suddenly to fall over. He filled it again, and again it fell. And this happened a third time. And in a rage he snatched up the jug and broke it. Returning to his right mind, he knew that the demon of anger had mocked him, and he said: 'Here am I by myself, and he has beaten me. I will return to the community. Wherever you live, you need effort and patience and above all God's help.' And he rose up, and went back."[3]
Belden Lane writes: "The desert monks were hardly naïve despisers of culture. What they fled with greatest fear was not the external world, but the world they carried inside themselves: an ego-centeredness needing constant approval, driven by compulsive behavior, frantic in its effort to attend to a self-image that always required mending."[4] Ironically, in the fleeing they ran smack dab into the very thing they sought to avoid. As Pogo said in his comic strip, "We have met the enemy, and he is us"!
Gateway to Silence: Lead me into the wilderness of silence and simplicity.
References:
[1] Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford University Press: 1998), 165.
[2] Ibid., 168.
[3] Owen Chadwick, ed., trans., Western Asceticism (The Library of Christian Classics, Ichthus Edition: The Westminster Press, 1958), 92.
[4] Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, 166.
Center for Action and Contemplation
cac.org
Center for Action and Contemplation
1823 Five Points Road SW (physical)
PO Box 12464 (mailing)
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87195 United States
____________________________
____________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment