Nov 212012
 

Over the years, Thanksgiving has become my favorite holiday.  Part of my Thanksgiving practice is to approach the word ‘thanksgiving’ anew, meditating upon it without assuming I have plumbed all its depths.  Those meditations have led me to explore some of its meaning in previous Thanksgiving posts.  This year I want to begin by highlighting its universality.   On Thanksgiving Day, we unite our hearts and minds around a single theme that we can all value, regardless of our religious, political, and ethnic differences.  It requires no air of nationalism, patriotism, or allegiance to any cause.  Rich and poor alike can feel the glow of thankfulness in their hearts, and know the joy of expressing it.  It is simply and fundamentally human to know and share gratitude.  Therefore this day is a very natural opportunity to remember our unity in the spirit of humanity.*

Rather than say much more on the universality in thanksgiving, this year I want to invite you to ponder its universality for yourself, and to include that theme along with some other questions and ideas about thanksgiving.  What does the word ‘thanksgiving’ mean to you?  Does it mean to remember people and things for which you are or might be thankful?  Does it mean to offer up your thanks in prayer and praise to God?  Does it mean to share your gratitude openly with others?  All of the above?  Is there something else?  How does it affect your understanding of thanksgiving if you apply Matthew 25:40?

Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.

Who will you directly, personally, and sincerely thank for being who and what they are?

Here are some words from others that I find worth pondering, and I offer them for your meditations as well.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.
Melody Beattie

Make thankfulness your sacrifice to God, and keep the vows you made to the Most High.
Psalm 50:14 (NLT)

At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.
Albert Schweitzer

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.
John Milton

Always be joyful. Never stop praying. Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus. Do not stifle the Holy Spirit.
1 Thessalonians 5:16-19 (NLT)

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

A person however learned and qualified in his life’s work in whom gratitude is absent, is devoid of that beauty of character which makes personality fragrant.
Hazrat Inayat Khan

Devote yourselves to prayer with an alert mind and a thankful heart.
Colossians 4:2 (NLT)

‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.
Alice Walker

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.
Karl Barth

Since everything God created is good, we should not reject any of it but receive it with thanks.
1 Timothy 4:4(NLT)

God is always coming to you in the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Meet and receive Him there with gratitude in that sacrament.
Evelyn Underhill

In the New Testament, religion is grace and ethics is gratitude.
Thomas Erskine

My thanks to you, dear reader, for being someone who visits this blog and ChristianMystics.com, meeting others and me in spirit whether you comment or not.  May you know the deepest blessings of thankfulness and gratitude, where giver and receiver meet and realize their unity, and thus giving and receiving are one.   In the comments section, please share anything that comes to you while you meditate upon thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Agape

* Even though I view thankfulness as universal, and this holiday as an opportunity to remember and celebrate the spiritual unity of humanity, it is nonetheless true that many Native Americans consider Thanksgiving Day as a National Day of Mourning.  In my thankfulness, I also remember that much for which I am thankful has come with the cost of horrible atrocities.  I wish to honor the many contributions, willing and unwilling, Native American people have made to the USA and the world.

Nov 162012
 

The great mystic anchoress, Julian of Norwich, has said these two simple things:

Between God and the soul there is no between. (1)

The fullness of Joy is to behold God in everything. (2)

While these statements are short and plainly written, their implications for the mystical life are nonetheless profound.

First, let’s consider what is meant by ‘soul’. Today, as in Julian’s day, it is common for Christians to think of the soul as an immaterial thinking and feeling aspect of our being that occupies or animates the physical body. (Anima, the Greek root of ‘animate’, actually means soul.)  For some people, ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ are interchangeable, yet in Christianity there is an ancient tradition of considering the whole human being as a trinity – body, soul, and spirit – where spirit is the very essence of our being in its most transcendent state or level. The soul is therefore the immanent manifestation of spirit, taking on a particular identity through life in this world. In this context, we see that the soul of a human being, at least while living in this world, cannot be understood in its wholeness apart from the body. The importance of this wholeness to Christianity is reflected in the doctrine of the resurrection of the physical body.   In any case, all of our thoughts and feelings, our knowledge of self, of the world, and even of God, develop in conjunction with our bodily experiences in this world. Therefore, in reflecting upon the soul’s relationship with God, it makes sense to consider all the dimensions of human experience – physical, emotional, intellectual, and transcendental – as offering ways of knowing oneness with God or, as Julian says, beholding God in everything.

It is my observation that most people who are driven to experience greater communion with God tend to seek powerful emotional or intellectual experiences they take to be the preferred evidence of God’s presence in their lives. In fact, many people focus almost exclusively on a particular type of experience as the only one they consider truly valid, and so they might strive repeatedly to evoke such an experience through corresponding activities and ignore or negate the other possibilities. However, if Julian is right, and I believe she is, then limiting the ways we are open to knowing God is how we ourselves create an illusory “between” to separate us from God, and thereby we rob ourselves of the “fullness of joy” that is possible for us.

Opportunities to appreciate this fullness are constantly available.  It takes very little consideration to realize that these dimensions are intricately interconnected. Indeed it is arguably impossible to conceive of a physical, emotional, or intellectual experience that is not accompanied by experience in at least one of the other two dimensions.  Even dreams, visions, and hallucinations, which we might be tempted to deny any material reality, are nonetheless accompanied by electrochemical activity in our bodies, and they are experienced by the mind as having the sensory characteristics of physical objects and events. And while intuiting or contemplation in the transcendental dimension can occur apart from the other dimensions, it also immediately gives rise to reactions in one or more of them.

Finally, in playing on Julian’s words, I want to note that ‘the fullness of love is to behold the beloved in all ways’ – physical, emotional, intellectual, and transcendental.  In its various forms, prayer, being the intentional effort to commune with God,  also has the potential to reach across all four dimensions, if it does not always do so to some degree. These realizations, taken with Jesus’ teaching to love God with all that we are and our neighbors as ourselves, and all of it considered within the context of St. John’s assertion that God is Love, provides us with the richest, most promising, most accessible, and most whole model for what it can mean to be a Christian mystic.

Maranatha

Agape

 

 

1.Chapter 46, Revelations of Divine Love; another version reads, “For our soul is so fully oned to God of His own Goodness that between God and our soul may be right nought.”

2. Chapter 35; another version reads, “…for it is more worship to God to behold Him in all than in any special thing.”

Nov 132012
 

First, it is no longer because…

…I’d be afraid of eternal hellfire if I weren’t a Christian. I just don’t believe that’s how things work.  It is impossible for me to believe in a supreme god so cruel and narrow-minded that he/she/it would create billions of human beings to be born into circumstances making it impossible to choose Christianity, or any other belief system, as the only way to eternal bliss.  While we might be free to create our own living hell to the degree that we choose the illusion of separation from the One, I do not believe that choice is available to us as a limited-time offer.  As I understand it, God’s love must be infinite, and so we have all eternity to welcome it and thus realize our oneness with God and each other.  However any of our beliefs and understandings might be mistaken, and our actions misguided, I completely trust God to be endlessly merciful and patient with understanding each of us even better than we understand ourselves.

…I’m too afraid of following a different path from many of my loved ones. While I know that some of my Christian friends and family members would be disappointed and in fear for my soul if I disavowed Christianity, I also know that others would not.  All the human acceptance, belonging, and companionship I could ever need would still be available to me, and I know that those hurt or frightened by my choice would be okay.  Furthermore, there is a limit to how far I am willing to go in accommodating the prejudices of even my dearest loved ones, and for everyone’s sake one thing I will not do is pretend to hold religious beliefs that don’t make sense to me or resonate with the still small voice in my heart.

…I judge other religions as inferior, misguided, or evil. As a Christian, I believe we all share equally in the Logos, the Word that is one with God and through which all that is has come to be.  As I understand it, when Jesus says things such as, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6),  he is speaking on behalf of the universal Logos, not of himself as the historical man, Jesus of Nazareth. Every philosophy, religion, spiritual tradition, every art and every science, is a manifestation of the Logos expressing and experiencing Itself through us.  In keeping with this, I do not believe the Christian Bible, in any version, is the one, true, inerrant, perfect and complete word of God, or even the best collection of revelation and wisdom available to all humanity.  There is no ‘best one’ for all humanity, but only a ‘best’ for each of us if we are so moved by the Spirit to discover for ourselves.  Finally, to me Christianity is not a religious team competing against other religious teams.  I will not cheer “Yay!” for ‘our side’ and “Boo!” for ‘their side.’  There is only one side, and it is all of us, believers of every faith and non-believers alike, each responding to the mysteries of our existence in the best way we can.

Each of those motivations has, at one time in my life or another, been part of why I called myself a Christian.  I’m thankful for the Divine Grace and Infinite Love that has freed me from them.

I am a Christian because…

…I was born into a Christian world. The sounds of Christianity were entering my consciousness before I left my mother’s womb.  All the other sensations of Christianity have been flooding into me ever since I was born.  My abilities to think, to speak, to sing, to recognize my feelings, to experience trust, hope, and love, to identify one person as family, another as friend, and another as neighbor or community member, all of these developments in my consciousness occurred in a Christian environment.  The stories of the Bible were like family legends.  Jesus was a beloved member of the family we all hoped to finally meet face-to-face, and his Father was our Heavenly Father whom we trusted to guide and protect us.  In time, I would even come to embrace his mother as The Mother.  I know that all of this means I am virtually hardwired to experience and express myself as a Christian. Therefore, all the deepest insights into my own psyche, both conscious and subconscious, all the highest realizations of the spirit animating my life in this world, all the most powerful acts of love I can participate in, cannot help but be interwoven with the emblems, stories, and rituals of Christianity.  Every piece of it is a path back through my psychological inner child to the spiritual child that is a spark of the Divine. The same is true of any other religion for those who are born to it.

…Christianity is my religious home. I have had my rebellion and have made my quest into the larger world of religions and philosophies.  I have enjoyed and benefited from what I have found.  Some of those things will always be with me, and others I will return to from time to time.  Yet, like the prodigal son, I also discovered that home is indeed where the heart is, and my heart is enfolded by Christianity.  It is the religion in which I find it most natural to express my spiritual awe, gratitude, and love of life.  Despite what I previously said about not being too afraid to be different from many of my loved ones, the fact remains that Christianity is interwoven with most of my closest relationships.  It is the common language of spirit we speak with each other, and I no longer see it as a barrier between me and the people of other faiths.  I’m deeply grateful for all these things, and no longer see any compelling reason to reject Christianity as my religious home.  Home is where the heart is.

…I don’t need to practice a different religion. I have found that Christianity offers everything I want and need in a religion.  Where I once judged it inferior in some ways to other religions, I have come to see that this was primarily because my own perspective was so narrow, shallow, and poorly informed, and because my immediate religious environment was so limited. Both the worldly and the mystical wisdom of our scriptures and early fathers and mothers becomes clearer with each passing year. Even as the history of our religion has many examples of very human shortcomings and atrocities, I nonetheless see the cup of this tradition overflowing with intelligence, creativity, grace, peace, joy, and love. The poetry, visual art, music, and ceremonies of Christianity are beautiful to me.  They inspire me to contemplate the transcendent and they move me to feel intimacy and kinship with all creation.  The Church offers me countless opportunities, encouragement, support, and role models for service to others.  What else could I possibly need?  Perhaps a different perspective is needed from time to time, but one perspective needs to already be in place in order for another to be different, and I no longer feel that being a Christian prohibits me from seeing differently.

Maranatha

Agape