We Grow Into The Unknown

What I am about here is the orchestration of perception. I take the director’s baton and tap, tap, tap, bring into harmonious arrangement the squawking chaos of discordant perspectives by inviting you to speak your truth of the particular part you are to the receptive ear of the whole. Our voices unite us in the oneness of expression when, speaking, we are heard, respected, honored, well received and understood.

Each of you has your own way of seeing, your own way of apprehending and assessing reality. I am not about to talk you into seeing the way I see, into valuing what I value, into thinking the way I think, but. By saying what I see and think, I can force you into reacting to what I say, into thinking about what I say, into thinking for yourself about what I say—and if I can get you to think about your reaction, to dig into it, the exploration can be fruitful. You may well deepen, expand, enlarge your thinking just by thinking about your thinking. Or, you may just retrench yourself in your preferred pattern of thought. Oh well.

But the rule here is to dig where there is water, where there is emotional response to what you see and hear. Opposition is as valuable as agreement. What we are looking for is the emotional level of your response. The more stirred up you are, either positively or negatively, the better. Explore your reaction. What buttons am I pushing? Why are they hot for you? What memories come to mind in relation to that button being pushed? Talk to the reactive side of yourself. Interview her, him. See what she, what he, has to say. Spend time digging down to the heart of the matter. Poke around in the muck. See what is there. What ALL is there.

What I’m good for is waking you up to you, inviting you to meet yourself, your own thoughts and explore where they come from, where they lead. You have to do the work of figuring out why you are responding to me as you are. It isn’t a matter of getting me to be more like you want me to be, to say more of what you want me to say, but of examining your desire to change me. What’s up with that, as they say.

The same goes for your reaction to one another, to what the other is saying. What is going on? You have to do the work required to know. You have to trace things back to the source in order to find and face what is there. It isn’t enough to say, “Oh, I know what this is about,” and letting it go at that. Pretend you don’t know, or recognize that you don’t know all there is to know. Dig into what it is about. Sit with it. See what comes, what happens. What is being asked of you? What response do you need to make?

We are all blind to what we do not want to see, but. What needs to be seen is constantly coming at us in our physical and emotional reactions to our life experience, and in our dreams. Something is trying to get us to see what we do not want to see. We have to learn to look. This is our spiritual work, looking at what we do not want to see. This is the next piece of the puzzle, the next step in the journey. It has nothing to do with agreement or disagreement with what instigates the reaction. It has to do with following the reaction to its source and seeing what is there to deal with, or follow, or serve. What is there? We have to face the demon, to call it by name, and see what happens.

This is called knowing what is true and what is also true, or knowing how things are and how things also are. We do not know what we do not know, and so, we have to be wondering what else is there, what more there is to know. We grow into the unknown, into the unknown that we don’t know anything about, and into the unknown aspects of what we think we know very well, including ourselves.

We are an aspect of the mystery that we do not know. Life is not so much about getting what we want and arranging our lives like we want them to be, but about knowing who we are, who else we are, who all we are, by opening ourselves to what else is there. We open ourselves to the mystery and assist the unconscious, unknown, energies that are calling our name, beckoning us to take up our work of knowing and becoming who we are, doing the work that is ours to do, and aligning ourselves with the life that is ours to live. This is lived spirituality. It is not head stuff, thinking and believing certain ways. It is life stuff, living the life that is right for us, the life that we are created to live, by stepping into the mystery, into the unknown, trusting ourselves to it, singing our own song, and living the adventure that is our life. Amen! May it be so!

Carrying the Imago Dei to Term

We have to do the work required to bring ourselves forth. There is nothing automatic or natural about the process of the “second birth.” It is brought on by the realization of dissatisfaction with the world as it is, of the emptiness and insufficiency of the wasteland that is our life. And if our life does not seem to be a wasteland, if we are breezing right along with everything as it should be and nothing more than the usual complaints about the weather and politicians to disrupt the flow, then there is no reason to question the framework within which we live, or the structure we have been told holds things in place.

It takes an encounter with unwanted reality to shock us into the realization that the way we have been told things are is not the way things are. Without that, things rock along in an acceptable kind of way, and we live out our days without raising our eyes to the possibilities or digging a well to the waters of life flowing beneath our feet.

We have to be awakened to the inability of our life to sustain itself with a diet of physical food and drink. A tree may get all it needs from the nutrients in soil, water, light and air, but it takes more than that for human beings. We have to be grounded, rooted, in a different medium. We depend upon a vibrant connection with life beyond life, beyond the physical, biological, necessities of life—a life that flows with meaning and purpose and the freedom to explore our interests and devote ourselves to the work of giving physical expression to our creative imagination.

We plant things and paint things and build things and draw things. We see how things could be and work to bring that forth in our lives, and that work brings us to life in a way that a proper diet and exercise could never produce. There is something about us, something within us, that needs to become actual, tangible, real, through us in the world. It is not enough to be born. We are born as carriers, as hosts, of a different sort of life requiring a different sort of birth, and we live our lives giving birth again and again to different manifestations of the creative spirit that dwells within.

It sometimes takes a jolt of reality to wake us up to the failure of the things that are supposed to be satisfying to satisfy, and to send us on the search of the things of lasting, one might say, “eternal,” value. We cannot buy the things that matter, but we can buy the tools to produce the things that matter, to do the things that matter. To do that, of course, we have to know, we have to find, the things that matter. Not the things that are supposed to matter. Not the things someone else tells us matter. But the things that matter because we know, we say, they matter. We find those things by taking up the practice of listening to our lives, of noticing our body’s response to our lives, in order to find what “clicks” with us, what resonates with us, and what does not.

Resonation is the key. Too often, we build our lives around the things we are supposed to do, or the things that are supposed to be fulfilling, when we experience dissonance, not resonance, in response to those things. When we ignore the disparity between how we are supposed to feel and how we actually feel we pay a price. We have to be alert to the sense of being out-of-alignment, out-of-sync, out-of-harmony, and move away from discord to accord in order to find the spiritual ground of our lives, the environment where our spirit thrives, and life takes on new meaning.

We are the point of contact between worlds, and our work is always to connect the worlds, to bring forth the inner, spiritual, world into the outer world of normal, apparent, reality. It used to be that the physical world was filled with messages and directives, signs and portents, from the unconscious. Then we came "of age." And now our task is finding our way back to the land we once knew by paying attention to instinct, being aware of intuition. Looking, listening. The process is to look, listen, see, hear, understand, know, do, be. If we get that down, we save the world.

We save the world by being the self we are called to be. The self we are called to be is the Image of God, the Imago Dei, the Christ within. The Imago Dei is a mustard seed, yeast in the dough, invisibly influential. Cast aside by the builders, transforming the world. You. Me. Us. This is the self within we are called to bring forth, to birth in our lives. We are mid-wives here to assist the birthing of the Imago Dei through us into the world. We are the Virgin bringing forth the Bebe Jesus. Our task is always to take the circumstances and conditions of life, of the moment, and imagine how to use them to bring forth the life within. In so doing, we come alive in the fullest possible sense of the word, and, yes, save the world!

It's A New World

Paul couldn’t know what we know and think the way he thought. For one thing, his idea about the immediacy of Christ’s return in apocalyptic glory to institute the cosmic reign of the kingdom of God would go swiftly out of the window, and he would have to go back to the desert for another three years in order to come up with a newer way of understanding the implications of the life and death and resurrection appearances of Jesus. He would have to make sense of things in a different way. Which is exactly the work that is ours to do. We have to make sense of things in a way that is dramatically different from the way Paul and the apostles made sense of things. What they thought has not been borne out in our experience. We cannot think the way they thought.

This flashes us back to the Wednesday night program this past week. We watched part two in a series about the movement from Jesus to Christ, from the Jesus Movement to Christianity. The narrator mentioned that in the aftermath of the death of Jesus the tradition that had built up around the idea of the Messiah had to be reinterpreted. How many times throughout history have traditional assumptions and expectations had to be reinterpreted in light of events and experience that did not bear them out?

The end is always near. The world as we know it is always coming to an end. We are always having to rethink, re-imagine, re-work, the traditions to take into account the contradictions and incompatibilities between what we have been told and what we experience. We are always coming up against some reality that doesn't square with how we think things are, with how we wish things were, with how we want things to be. That's the end of that world. Poof. Gone.

How many worlds have come and gone? Ways of life, civilizations, ideas about how things are? When the parents divorce, the child's world goes. How many times have the traditions been reinterpreted, revised, to fit new realities, new worlds, incompatible with the old way of seeing? How many traditions, sacred truths, blessed convictions, have dissolved before the advance of a new way of seeing? Don't hold on too tightly to how you think things are! “It’s a new world, Golda!” And a newer one is on the way! Successful religions reinterpret their traditions in light of the new world that has dawned. Unsuccessful religions collapse when their cornerstone beliefs are not sustained by their life experience.

The work of religion is the work of squaring us up with the conditions of the world that greet us at birth. And, at some point in our lives, we have to return the favor and do the work of squaring our religion up with the changing conditions of life which no longer support the beliefs and constructs of our religion. Copernicus and Galileo and Darwin and Jung have given us a world the old religious assumptions don’t fit, and we have to re-think the traditions to take the new world into account, or else.

Always the question: What does this have to do with that? What does this world have to do with that one? What do those traditional ways of seeing and thinking have to do with this new way of seeing and thinking about the world in which we live? What do those stories, that system of beliefs, have to do with this turn of events, this reality?

The movement of soul, the spiritual journey, is always from bondage to freedom—from bondage to the old way of thinking, seeing, being—from bondage to the old traditions—to the freedom of new life, new vision, new ways of thinking, seeing, being. This is the message of Easter, Resurrection, and New Birth. The old has passed away, behold the new has come. And within a generation or less, this new will be old and will be replaced by a newer New, and we will have to move again from bondage to the old way of perceiving reality to the freedom of another new way of beholding the world and our place in it.

Ours is the task of reinterpreting, re-thinking, the old traditions, the old symbols. They are not automatically relevant, pertinent, meaningful. What does that say to this? We have to rework the traditions to make the connections, but, the work is not easy. Who wants to do the work of rethinking, reworking, the old symbols? Who wants to think, reflect, wonder, imagine, struggle to make new connections? Distractions are easier, diversions are more fun. Who has time to spend in the search for meaning and purpose when Wii waits? Wii will have to wait, because no one can re-work the symbols, the traditions, for us. Each of us must do the work for herself, himself. We cannot be told what there is to know, see, understand, perceive, grasp, get. Truth cannot be explained to us. We have to do the work. We have to find a symbol or image that moves us. Listen to it. Follow where it takes us, into the far reaches of a brand new world.

Integrity Is So The Point

Integrity is the highest good. We live with integrity when we live so that outer reflects inner, so that Thou Art That, consciously, intentionally, and the unitive Oneness is apparent, real in our lives. Joseph Campbell says “We should become transparent to transcendence.” He means that we, that our lives, should be like panes of glass through which Transcendent Reality shines. We should live our lives so as to exhibit, express, bring forth, make plain the truth of the transcendent core, or heart, or soul of who we are. There is always more to us than meets the eye, and we are to live so as to bring that forth, giving it birth, bringing it to life in the world of normal, apparent, reality.

This is the work of Incarnation. When we align ourselves with our life, with the life we are called to live, the transcendent source of life shines through our living. We are “transparent to transcendence,” and God is known. This is how we are called to live. This is how Jesus lived: “The Father and I are one. When you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” Or, as Paul says it, “It is no longer I who live, but (the) Christ who lives in me.” That’s it. And what prevents it? What gets in the way of that? Oh, everything. Our wishes, wants, desires, fears, ambitions… Our ideas of how our life should be lived. WE get in the way of that. And so, the work—the spiritual task, quest, journey, path—is to get out of the way!

Our life is not a long list of things to get done—to accomplish, achieve, acquire, amass—before we die, and it isn't a place to hang out until we die, it's where we bring forth who we are born, who we are called, to be. Joseph Campbell says, “Each of us has a track to find and follow.” Our life is our canvass and we are the masterpiece we produce by living it. But that is not something we think up and force into being. We don’t produce ourselves so much as align ourselves with ourselves. We acquiesce to the Self within—the Self we are called to be. WE become transparent to the Self within which transcends our idea of who we want to be. We surprise ourselves with who we are.

It isn't easy, being who we are, living the life that is ours to live. Better to be invisible, to go along to get along, to make no waves. The world blends us into its way of doing things. It's easier when we don't think, resist, react, but just go along like unconscious cows. Yet, to make no waves is to disappear beneath the water, to drown in the great corporate sea of unconsciousness that does what is supposed to be done without knowing what it is doing.

But, it's hard enough finding a parking place, remembering what we need at the grocery store. We have too much already on our minds. The life that is ours to live is on its own. We don't want to have to think about who we are and what is ours to do. Inner work is more than we can manage. And it is essential that we do it!

Inner work begins with paying attention to our body. Joseph Campbell says, “Your body is a vehicle of consciousness.” We are consciousness becoming conscious! We become conscious by becoming conscious of our body and its reaction to our experience. Our body’s reaction to external experience is a bridge to the inner world. When we become conscious of our body’s reaction to external experience, we can follow that reaction to its source in the inner world and become aware of what meets us there. Our experience of our experience transforms our lives. Inner world meets outer world. Who we are is incarnated in how we live.

This is much different from memorizing creeds and believing what we are told to believe out of a book of doctrine. What is within that needs to be brought forth, birthed, expressed, made known? How do we place ourselves in its service? Find who we are? Make ourselves transparent to transcendence? These are the questions which ground us in spiritual reality and save the world.

Our work is to find and live our own lives, to be who we are, who we are called to be, within the time and place of our living. Human beings in primal societies have always understood our true work as being that of maintaining alignment with soul, with the unconscious, invisible, spiritual world. As civilization developed, we set that understanding aside in order to serve our own ambitions, desires, and ideas of what was important. That hasn’t turned out so well, and our lives are empty, devoid of meaning, and our life is a wasteland. Now, we are at the point of finding our way back to listening to what the inner, spiritual, world has to say, and collaborating with it along the way.

How do we consciously make ourselves a partner with the unconscious, with the unknown, with what we don’t know? How do we attend, commune with, the inner voices? How do we honor the inner world and recognize it as a full partner in the work of finding our way along the way? The answers to these questions constitute the work of soul. It is the work of aligning ourselves with our lives, and waits for us to take it up and become who we are.

Unconscious Cows

I place before you this morning three things: The First Commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me!” The central proclamation of first century Christians: “Jesus Christ is Lord!” And, Julie Strope. As we see how these three things are really One, as is the case with every triune configuration when perceived with hearts that understand, we will see what is ours to do in the time left to us.

The First Commandment admonishes all adherents: Do not do it as you see it being done about you! There were nothing but “other gods” in those days, and in these. And the First Commandment calls us away from the way our neighbors are doing things to consider for ourselves how things truly need to be done, so that we might do it.

The declaration “Jesus Christ is Lord” was only half of the formula for first century believers. The other half, always implied and sometimes stated, if only under one’s breath, was “And Caesar is NOT Lord!” In this way, the early church carried forward the Old Testament dharma: “Do not do it as you see it being done about you!”

And, of course, this leads us to Julie Strope. Of all the things you could think to say about Julie Strope, never would you say that she did anything the way it was being done around her. This is the single characteristic essential for the salvation of the world, and Julie has embodied it beautifully, and has lived before us as a wonderful example of how it is to be done.

Jesus stood before the Pharisees, looked them in the eye, and asked, “Why don’t you judge for yourselves what is right?” And he asked his disciples point blank, “Who do YOU say that I am?” It is the independent judgment of individual human beings that keeps things balanced and sane, that makes the world livable, that enables life. When we stop thinking for ourselves and stop making up our own minds about what is important and how we will live our lives, things take a quick turn for the worse, and we follow one another like unconscious cows down worn paths to the pasture and back to the barn without ever being alive and present in the life we are living.

Who could be alive and present in the life we are living? Who could stand it? Who could be awake and alive for life as it is being lived around us? It seems obvious that we have to make ourselves unconscious—that we have to put ourselves to sleep—just to make it through our days. DO NOT DO IT AS YOU SEE IT BEING DONE ABOUT YOU! This is the spiritual task, quest, path, journey: Bearing the pain of waking up and living our own lives!

Our work is deciding how to live our own lives in the time and place—within the context and circumstances—of our living. This is our spiritual work and our calling, to bring forth who we are within the hard and fast realities of physical existence. This is the work of incarnation, giving the spiritual “I am” physical, tangible, actual existence in the world of normal, apparent, reality. We cannot hand this responsibility over to some external authority, some culture, some group, some guru, some guide, and go where we are told to go and do what we are supposed to do. DO NOT DO IT AS YOU SEE IT BEING DONE ABOUT YOU!

Our life is all we have to work with. It is the only tool at our disposal in the task of bringing forth who we were born, and who we are called, and who we are built, to be. If we just follow the other cows to the pasture and back to the barn all our lives long we will live and die as an unconscious cow.

That will never be said of Julie Strope. May it never be said of any of us! May it be said of us that we made the decisions that were needed to be made in order to live our own life, and may the life we live as our own be the life that is ours to live, the life with our name on it. Amen! May it be so!

Stay On The Beam!

The value of any religion is the degree to which it connects us with who we are and the life that is our life to live. The spiritual life is the life that is unique to us, the life we are called to incarnate, bring forth, give birth to within the physical world of normal, apparent, reality. The spiritual ground of our existence, is the truth of who we are which demands expression in the world of physical existence. We are to do what brings us forth! Religion that is helpful helps us find the path with our name on it, helps us find the way that leads to ourselves and the life that is ours to live. Religion that is not helpful conceals the way, blocks the path, tells us it knows best, cuts us off from ourselves and assimilates us into the norms and the corporate mind of the religion.

All religions have their rules to live by. Jesus speaks of those rules when he says, "Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees (& Mama Gurus)!" There are no black footprints! There is no blueprint! There are no shortcuts to the life that is your life to live! The only rule to live by is: STAY ON THE BEAM! Joseph Campbell says, “We know when we are on the beam and when we are off of it.” The only thing to know is when we are on the beam and when we are off of it.

When are you "on the beam"? What gets you off of it? What pretends to be better than the beam? What competes with the beam? How are you going to live in the time left for living? What are you going to do with your life? What is LIFE for you? How much will you LIVE? How will you LIVE within the context and circumstances of your life? These are essential spiritual questions.

We don't need organized religion to help us answer these questions, to help us to stay on the beam, but we need the church as it ought to be! Those who help us look, listen, know, do!

I'm your Mama (Guru)! Listen to me when I say: “DON'T LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN TO YOU!” Learning to listen to yourself is the heart of the spiritual journey. Who helps you hear what you have to say? To whom do you talk in order to hear yourself speak? In order to speak the truth that must be said, heard, lived? That person is, those people are, the church for you. Your church is the people in your life who help you stay on the beam. That is the "soul" purpose of the church, keeping folks on the beam!

Spirituality is not about what you think or believe but what you do. How you live. How well you live aligned with the life that is your LIFE. You cannot do what someone else (the Mama Gurus) tells you to do. Your spiritual practice is living YOUR life! Our LIFE is our spiritual practice. We practice LIVING until we get it down. And practice it after we get it down because we love it, because it is life for us.

What constitutes LIFE for you? How does the way you are living assist the experience of LIFE? Prevent it? How must you change the way you live in order to LIVE? These are essential spiritual questions. What are you going to do to do what is yours to do? To do what has, is, LIFE for you? When will you take up the work of being who you are, of doing what is yours to do? What do you intend, what do you mean, with the life you are living? How closely aligned is your present life with the “beam,” with the life that is your life to live? These are essential spiritual questions. Who helps you ask and answer them?

Our lives are self-adjusting, self-directing, self-correcting internal guidance systems when we live them with time for observation, reflection, examination and exploration. We have to take the time to listen to our lives, to listen to ourselves speak about our lives, to find the images that reflect our lives and listen to them. We are generally unaware of the images and symbols that carry the meaning of our lives and can point us to that meaning when we allow it. But, we are all aware of our symptoms. Symptom must become image! We have to sit with our symptoms and allow the image to immerge and speak or move, to say what it has to say, to show us what it would have us see. This sounds crazy, but it isn’t crazy. It is spiritual. It is spiritual work to listen to our images, to hear what they have to say.

We have to avail ourselves of the guidance that is available to us if we would find our way to the beam, to the path, with our name on it, to the Holy Grail, to the life that is our life to live. This means listening to our body’s response to our experience and finding the images which interpret and express the meaning of that response so that we might commune with our intuition and instinct and STAY ON THE BEAM! Amen! May it be so!

Hey, wait a minute!

There are two fundamental religious orientations. Every religion in the world falls into one or the other category of thought about God. The religion either says: “There is no God but the God we say is God!” Or it says: “There is more to God than we know of God.” Between the two orientations lies a world of difference.

Jews, Christians and Muslims opt for “There is no God but the God we say is God,” which makes for difficult going along the road together, and has led to all manner of persecutions and pogroms and jihads and religious wars and religious wars disguised as political wars over the years.

Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists and other perspectives of the east opt for “There is more to God than we know of God.” Adherents of each religion (And Buddhism claims not to be a religion but there are those prayer flags to consider, and those votive offerings to explain, and that entire pantheon of gods to take into account) may hold other religious perspectives in low esteem (Vietnamese Buddhists don’t use singing bowls to call them to meditation as Tibetan Buddhists do, and are somewhat smug about it), but they don’t have standing armies to protect themselves from one another, or to use in doing one another in.

The two views of God are the primary and essential point of theological demarcation. Everything hinges on the choice we make about God at the beginning. The paths that diverge at that point are very different all along the way. “There is no God but the God we say is God,” closes doors and demands conversion or eternal damnatkion, assimilation or excommunication, agreement or the designation of heretic or infidel. “There is more to God than we know of God” opens doors, invites inquiry and conversation, welcomes divergent views, and laughs at the idea that anyone or any group could ever know enough of God to wrap God up in a creed, or catechism, or book of confessions and brandish it about as though it were the last word, or even the next-to-last word.

So, guess where I stand in the matter. Where I stand in the matter makes it impossible for me to stand before you as the spokesperson for a denomination that knows what you should think about God and places me before you to tell you what that is. Remember the story of the blind men and the elephant. It’s a Hindu story. Not a Jewish story, or a Christian story, or a Muslim story. There is more to the elephant than we know of the elephant. But, as we share our perspectives, our life experience, we are enlarged, deepened, expanded, stretched, in our own understanding of the elephant, and grow in our understanding of things spiritual.

But the nature of this growth requires more of us than listening to a monologue once a week, or whenever the mood strikes you. A monologue is a skimming stone. We need a good conversation to take us beneath the surface. So, I’ve created a Beyond 920 Group to oversee the offerings of programs and courses that will open us to the world of spiritual development and that world to us. It’s the next phase of the 920 experience, and will use the atmosphere we have produced here to enable us to be more than we could ever be on our own. And this without compulsion or force or threat of excommunication! Stay tuned, more will be coming soon.

In the meantime, there is the matter of ourselves and our perspective to take into account. The greatest impediment to the development of our spiritual life is our understanding of life, what we think it means to be alive, what we do to feel alive. The way we live is the greatest determinant of the quality and depth of our spiritual life. If we want to grow spiritually, we have to change the way we live.

The spiritual life is not compatible with just any life. We cannot live just any old way and be spiritual. We have to acquiesce to the life that is ours to live but. We cannot hurry that move. Everything in its own time is the foundational spiritual law. We may have to wait awhile before we are ready for the spiritual life. We may have to try other lives on. See how they fit. Live them to their hollow, empty core.

No one can argue us out of our idea of where life is to be found. We have to find out for ourselves if we are right about it. Gay Paree, or its current equivalent, may be working for us. We cannot be spiritual before its time. We cannot live the spiritual life until we have given up on the other lives. The spiritual life waits for the shift in perspective required to see, hear, and understand—to know what is important and do it. Takes time. We have to be at the end of our rope, at the end of the line, before we can change our minds about what is important.

What's the hurry? If the life you are living is filled with meaning and enthusiasm and keeps you interested in what you are doing, live it! If we are in the middle of Gay Paree, eyes wide open, mouth agape, no one can talk us out of it. We have to see the emptiness before we can move on. Yet, in Gay Paree there must be those who talk of moving on, of what is beyond Gay Paree, even when there is none to listen, none to hear. We cannot wait until we have a receptive audience to say what is ours to say. The emperor gets by with no clothes forever when there is collusion.

Someone has to say, "Hey, wait a minute!" for the illusion to begin to fade. “Wal Mart isn't IT. Gay Paree is a sham. Glass beads and shiny plastic. See?” Wal Mart and Gay Paree ARE IT at some point for some of us. And at any point, there is always more to think and see than we are capable of thinking and seeing. We can only think what we are capable of thinking at any point in our lives, only see what we are able to see.

We shouldn't put too much at stake on how we think, see, at any point in our lives. We will turn a corner and think, see, things differently. There is more to God than we know of God. We begin the work of knowing more of God than we know of God, and of anything else—we take up the work of thinking and seeing beyond where we think and see—by seeing the discrepancies in what we think and see, and thinking about them.

Always the discrepancies, the discordances, the contradictions! They wake us up, pull us forward, move us beyond where we are. We have to see our seeing in order to see more than we see. We have to think about our thinking in order to think beyond where we are. Our thinking and our seeing will carry us to the heart of the life that is our life to live, to the path with our name on it, IF we see our seeing and think about our thinking.

Anything is possible with everything on the table, and everything must be always on the table. We must be always standing around the table, looking at what is on the table, talking about what is on the table, saying what we see, and what we also see and working to reconcile the discrepancies.

No matter what we think is so, we have to look for what else is so, for the truth beyond the truth we call truth, for the God beyond the God we say is God. When we think there is no truth beyond the truth we call truth, no God beyond the God we say is God, we are as good as dead. Are dead.

The right kind of company, and the church as it ought to be, is always saying, "Hey wait a minute! How does this square with that?", pointing out the discrepancies, forcing the work of life. The work that deepens us is the work of recognizing and reconciling ourselves with the contradictions at work in our lives. It takes us all to do that work. On our own, we are too shallow to splash. Too lazy to spot the contradictions or come to terms with them.

When we wake up, we wake up to the truth of contradiction and conflict, and to the work of squaring ourselves with how things are. Wholeness, becoming whole, integrity, is the work of recognition and reconciliation. We do not dissolve the tension between opposites but live consciously within it, maintaining it. We live the contradictions, doing one thing in its turn, in its time, with an eye always on the other thing, always honoring the opposition.

You have heard me say that I want to be the best (fill in the blank: father, husband, minister, etc) in all the world and I don't want to be a (fill in the blank) at all. Both sides of the equation are eternally true. Neither cancels out the other. I live in the tension between them constantly, consciously.

And I don’t think, “Oh, I must be a really bad person, a hypocrite, a liar, because I don’t REALLY want what I say I want! Or because I don’t know what I REALLY want!” I REALLY want opposite, mutually exclusive things! And I’m not wrong or bad for doing it! I just REALLY want mutually exclusive things! I “want to have my cake and eat it, too”! So do you.

The trend is to talk us out of our contradictions, to talk us into being one way only. As if! Denying the other side doesn't disappear it! It only makes us crazy, and symptomatic! The work is to be conscious of our contraries and to live them out as appropriately as possible. We need an environment which helps us do that. We have to square ourselves up to our opposing sides and work out their appropriate expression in our lives. Not easy, but very interesting! Where do we go to talk about the work of squaring ourselves up to our contradictions? Who helps us with it? The church as it needs to be! May that be who we are!

No Advanced Degrees in Spiritual Development!

There are no graduate degrees in spiritual development. There is only you and the life that is yours to live. Live it! That’s it! Oh, but! That’s not what we want to hear! We want to talk about God so that we might understand the nature of the divine/human encounter and be prepared. We want to be informed about how things are on the spiritual plane. We want a steadily graduated series of lectures, with flow charts and definitions (but don’t call them doctrines and don’t use churchy language) to explain the intricacies of the invisible world. But, we don’t want to be told to DO anything!

We seek knowledge of the spiritual life to keep from living the life that is ours to live. But, that IS the spiritual life! Our LIFE is spiritual when it is lived aligned with our (that word again) destiny. When we reduce the spiritual problem to it’s simplest form it comes down to the matter of getting us together with our life, the life that is our life to live. Spirituality is a two part process. There is you and there is your life. Our spiritual work is getting us together with our life. It is not easy.

Our life comes in three manifestations. There is the life that is our life to live, our destiny. There is the life that we wish were our life to live. And there is the life we think we have to live. We have to work out the life we actually live from among these three possibilities. It is no wonder we put off the work that is ours to do: getting together with, living aligned with, the life that is our life to live! No wonder we seek knowledge, read books, sign up for retreats, take pilgrimages! Anything to put off the work required to ferret out the life that is our life to live and live it!

We seek the advanced degrees in spiritual development to keep us from doing what is ours to do: Living the life with our name on it. We drag it out, having to get ourselves square with life, putting the life we wish were our life to live aside, and aligning ourselves with the life that is ours to live. That’s the work. That’s all there is to it, but it’s too much for us. So, we demur. We defer. We put it off. We read another book. Sign up for another workshop. Go to another lecture. Take another pilgrimage. Anything to avoid doing what is ours to do. Anything to not have to worry about living the life that is ours to live.

No one can decide for us what is ours to do, or do for us what is ours to do. No one can relieve us of the burden that is ours, knowing and doing what is ours to do, but we seek relief! "Mama Guru! Tell us what to do!" And, of course, Mama Guru doesn't want to do what is his, hers, to do and is glad for the distraction we provide and happy to tell us what to do. Mama Guru’s are everywhere with advice and counsel. They will read your palms, or your tea leaves, or your stars, or your dreams and tell you what to do.

None of us does what is ours to do, and when someone does we call him, her, a bodhisattva or Christ or Buddha, for doing what is theirs to do, for living their life. Because we recognize the wonder of it, and are blessed by it, but we turn away from doing it ourselves. It’s too hard, too demanding, too risky, too much fraught with uncertainty and insecurity and instability. Who knows what might be asked of us, or might happen to us, or where we might wind up?! Of course, if you think about it, those are the ingredients of a Great Adventure. But, we don’t think about it. We look away. We look for Mama Guru.

Call me Mama Guru. Call me your Mama. And listen to me. It is not hard, really. What is really hard is to NOT be who we are, who we are called to be. How would it look, say, from your death bed, to think of the life you didn’t live because you wanted to be safe and secure, insulated, protected? Why don’t you see how much you can live of the life that is yours to live in the time left for living? Come on. How about it? I’ll tell you all you need to know.

The only knowledge required for spiritual development, growth, is the knowledge of what needs to be done and what of that is ours to do. Simple. Nothing to it. Being clear about the next step is all the clarity you will ever need. Knowing what to do next is all you need to know. Knowing what's important is all you need to know. Knowing what needs doing is all you need to know. You can save a lot of time for living the life that is yours to live in the time left for living by not worrying about all the advice from the experts. Stop reading. Start living. The knowledge that is required for spiritual growth has nothing to do with concepts and doctrines and beliefs and ideas. Know what to do now! Do it! That’s all there is to it!

We can miss the point of our lives all our lives long. We keep missing it denying that we are missing it because it's too painful to confess that we are missing it, have missed it. But don’t think you can’t go back and pick something of it up, of the life that is yours to live. You can! There is time yet left for living. See what you can do. In the church of our experience this is called sin (missing the point) and repentance (turning around). It is getting back on track. Getting back on track has nothing to do with doctrine or belief but with finding our way to the life that is ours to live and living it.

We have the rest of our lives to get together with the life that is our life to live, the one with our name on it. You know what that is called: The search for the holy grail. The holy grail is the life that is our life to live, the container of us, the vehicle of ourselves, the carrier of who we are, the shape of our self. It is who we are built, who we are called, to be.

And, how do we know who that is, who we are called to be? How do we know what life is the life that is ours to live? Glad you asked. We know when the potato salad is too salty and when the tea is not sweet enough. And we know when we are living the life that is our life to live, and when we are not. Joseph Campbell says, “We know when we are on the beam and when we are off of it.” We only have to know what we know. That means we have to pay attention. We have to be quiet and listen.

The kind of listening that is required in the search for the holy grail is prayer. Prayer is not usually thought of as listening. We do anything BUT listen when we pray. We talk, talk, talk, hardly stopping to breathe. Confession, petition, intercession, praise and thanksgiving. Those constitute the five types of prayer. Nothing about listening anywhere. But, we have to listen for what we have to say. Then we have to listen to what we have to say. Then we have to listen for what else there is to say. Listening is the ground of prayer, the environment in which prayer is prayed.

Prayer is seeing, hearing, understanding. Prayer reveals all, exposes all. We can’t hide anything in prayer. Who do we think we are kidding? Prayer is not diplomacy, positioning, posturing, flattery, sweet talk, smooth talk, or adulation as though God is some powerful old fool. Prayer is the plain statement of all the truth we are capable of telling at every point in our lives. It is our way of hearing what we have to say. When we pray, we over-hear what we have to say and, holding nothing back, explore what else there is to say to the point of seeing all.

We pray ourselves to the point of seeing, hearing, and understanding, and, thus, knowing. We follow that up with doing and being. We live to become the person we know we need to be, living the life we know we need to live out of the awareness that is generated by prayerful listening to all we have to say. There you are. Seeing, hearing and understanding call for the realignment of ourselves with our lives. Seeing how things are, we know what to do about how things are.

And don’t even think about what’s in it for us. The what are we going to get out of it, out of living the life that is ours to live, is the deal killer. What do we think there is beyond having lived the life that is ours to live? The photograph is what I get out of photography! Life is what we get out of living! What more could there be? We spend our lives getting ourselves together with our lives. What we have to show for our effort is an interesting, meaningful life.

This is to say that no conditions apply. We do not negotiate or bargain our way to our destiny! No “If then therefore” clauses! We step into the rest of the time we have for living bent on living OUR life, the life with our name on it, no matter what! We hand ourselves over to our life and allow it to have its way with us. Anything is possible with everything on the table. So, everything is on the table. Nothing is off limits.

The butterfly has to escape the cocoon, has to escape the caterpillar, has to move beyond what got it to where it is, in order to be itself. We have to grow beyond what got us where we are if we hope to be who we are and live the lives that are our lives to live. Spiritual growth is a painful dying to what has gone before in order to live as fully as possible in the time left for living. May we do it with our eyes dancing and our arms spread wide!

Wanting

I know what your problem is. Your problem is that you aren’t getting what you want. If you were getting what you want, you wouldn’t have any problems. Isn’t that right? The only thing wrong with you is that you don’t have enough people in your life handing you what you want. The only thing standing between you and complete happiness, to the point of gleeful squeals and jigs of joy, is knowing the secret to having what you want. Well, you have come to the right place this morning! I am here to fix you up for the rest of your life: STOP WANTING! Wanting is ruining your life! If you didn’t want anything, you would be deliriously delighted with how things are right now.

We have painstakingly established the fact that if you didn’t have anything to want you would be serenely enraptured and blissful to the core. The quickest way to that happy land is to stop wanting. Instant bliss. There. That takes care of that. I would ask you if there is anything else I can do for you while I’m in the mood and we’re all here, but there couldn’t possibly be. Once you’ve stopped wanting, there is nothing else to ask for, nothing more to have. Life is good. And religion is now of no use to you whatsoever.

People have traditionally used religion as a tool to pry what they want from God. We are told that if we give ten percent of our annual income after taxes, deductions, exemptions, exclusions and expenses to God, in return, God will give us everything we ask for. It’s a very good deal. Where are you going to beat it? Give to Get. And to hear those who are selling it tell it, it works every time.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this little detail, but those selling the Give to Get deal are always those who handle our ten percent on its way to God. They are the middle persons, overseeing the transmission of our withdrawals to their deposit in the heavenly coffers. I’m not suggesting that that would be any reason for them to lie about how well the idea Giving to Get actually works, but it does sound a bit like bribery, inducement, enticement, or “priming the well” as they say in the deep south. I’m only pointing out that religion’s primary function is to position us to get what we want from God, and that if we didn’t want anything, where would preachers be?

Or advertising agencies? Or manufacturing conglomerates? Or, well, Wall Street? We’ve started something here, haven’t we. This is revolutionary. Radical stuff. There is no end to the implications. It could transform life as we know it. End life as we know it. If we didn’t want anything, there wouldn’t be anything. Where would that leave us? Desire-less living wouldn’t offer us anything to live for. The Buddha put forth desire as the origin of suffering, but the blessed state of desire-less-ness isn’t all that pain-free considering the mess things would be in if we stopped wanting.

We can't not-want! Wanting is the ground of existence. The economy is based on wanting, and everything is based on the economy. If we stopped swapping money around the table there would be very little eating, or anything else going on. So, never mind about the bliss of not-wanting. The Yogis can sit not-wanting, but somebody has to fill their rice bowls. Has to want to. Has to want to care for those who want-not. Religion is safe, and I have a job. Thanks for your part in filling my rice bowl.

But. Wanting does get in the way. What a tree wants doesn't matter. With the proper amount of light, water and nutrients, a tree is going to be a tree. What we want matters most. Why live if we can't have what we want? What's the point if it isn’t getting what we want? What a tree wants doesn't matter. What we want is the only thing that does matter. A tree will thrive with the right amount of water, light and nutrients. Not us. We have to have what we want or why live? A tree never asks, “Why live?” Trees live wherever they can for as long as they can, glad to be alive. Not us. We have to have what we want or else.

You’ve heard me say that the only thing standing between us and God is us. The only thing standing between us and the way that is The Way is us. And the thing about us that is in our way is our wanting, willful, way. So, what to do? We can’t want and we can’t not-want. It’s a pickle. The only way to move forward when you are in a pickle—when you are caught between two mutually exclusive options—is to do one thing with your eye on the other. You must not forget that you are in a pickle, and you must not let being in a pickle incapacitate you, immobilize you, and keep you from doing what needs to be done. When you are in a pickle, you must BE in a pickle, consciously, intentionally, deliberately—maintaining the tension of the opposite poles and bearing the pain of not being able to do either because of the other AND DO ONE with an eye on the other one.

We have to want wanting to not want.

Here’s how it works: There is wanting, and there is knowledge of wanting, knowing that we are wanting. Spend more time knowing you are wanting than wanting unknowingly. Don't just want, know that you are wanting. Be interested in the wanting. What does wanting keep you from facing, doing, thinking about? How does wanting insulate you from the life that is waiting to be lived? What role does wanting play? How does wanting keep you from living? How does wanting enable you to live?

The role of wanting in enabling life and preventing life is the heart of the matter. It revolves around the question, “Whose side are we on?” Wanting, when it is aligned with life and exercised in the service of life that is the heart and soul of life, what life is all about, is, as it has been phrased in the church of our experience, “obedience to the will of God.” Wanting that is opposed to life and contrary to the heart and soul of life, of what life is all about, is, as has been phrased in the church of our experience, “disobedience unto sin.” We can want what is right for us and we can want what is wrong for us. So, alongside of the question, “Whose side are we on?”, we place the question, “What do we want and how does that serve life or oppose life?”

In order to answer these questions, we have to answer the other question, “Of what does LIFE consist?” We don’t spend enough time with this one. It’s taken away from us by the ad agencies and cultural trends. LIFE consists of the lights and action of Gay Paree, or whatever the current equivalent is. But we can’t trust the commercials or the culture with this one. It’s the biggie. No one can tell us of what our life consists. That is ours to divine on our own.

The spiritual journey, quest, task is knowing and doing what is life for us. The church as it ought to be would be equipped to help you know what you are here for, to discern what is yours to do, to find the path with your name on it and live the life that is your life to live. We are talking that word you hate destiny here. We can’t escape it. And trying to puts us nose to nose with the essential question, “Whose side are we on?”

Here, we cannot avoid thinking about what we want. We have to think about what we want in order to want what is right for us, in order to live the life that is ours to live. We are not free to live any way we choose, to do whatever strikes our fancy. We cannot live any way we choose and be at home with ourselves, at peace with who we are. We can choose to live in ways that are at cross purposes with our destiny.

We know when things are right and when they are not right. We know when we are working with ourselves, when we are working against ourselves. We know when what we want is serving ends worthy of us, is aligned with the life that is our life to live, and when it is not. We know when we are kidding ourselves. IF we think about it. We avoid the pain of realization by living too fast to listen. Immersing ourselves in the lights and action of Gay Paree, we numb ourselves against the knowledge of having taken a wrong turn, again. We run from emptiness and seek to find a meaningful life in the catalogs, at the resorts and on the showroom floors, while destiny waits.

The good news/bad news is truth does not go away. Truth taps us on our shoulder with symptoms and a nagging sense that things are not right somehow. Emptiness, boredom, restlessness, anxiety all suggest that Paree isn’t it, and it is only a matter of time until we wake up or die with a withered soul. On the other hand, an indication of living in the service of our destiny is passion for life. Passion, enthusiasm, zest, zeal suggest destiny in the making. We cannot be connected with our destiny without being passionate about it, but passion is only an indicator, not evidence, of alignment with our destiny. Lethargy, emptiness, ennui, on the other hand, are evidence of life unlived, of destiny not served. We can be passionate about that which is not destiny. So, we have to think about what we are wanting, and keep an eye on ourselves at all times. Because shooting ourselves in the foot is what we do best.

The Invisible World

If you are going to believe anything, believe there is more to you than meets the eye. If you are going to believe anything else, believe that there is more to everyone and everything than meets the eye. It all starts with the presumption of The More, The Invisible, The Unknown, The More. The fundamental spiritual assumption is that the visible world rests on the invisible world. If you aren’t willing to make that assumption, there is, for you, no such thing as spirituality. All that is real and true is material, physical, logical, rational, concrete, actual, tangible, measureable, weighable, countable, objective and verifiable. Spiritual is immaterial, “of the spirit,” beyond the physical senses, a world apart from the world of ordinary, apparent reality. So, if you think there is more to it all than meets the eye, you belong here. If you don’t, you’re welcome, of course, to stay, but why?

The work of the church as it ought to be is the work of connecting its members with the unknown, invisible, world, with The More than meets the eye. Faith is actually trust that the invisible world, The More, exists and can be approached, apprehended, intuited, experienced, expressed and incarnated within the visible world of ordinary, apparent, reality. This kind of trust, the willingness to trust ourselves to the truth of the invisible world, is the only kind of faith we need to have. Everything flows from there.

Spiritual reality has a physical dimension. Physical reality has a spiritual dimension. There is a point, on the boundary between yin and yang, between spiritual and physical, at which both are one. If you experience the purely physical at a sufficient depth of awareness and appreciation, a doorway opens, a threshold is crossed, and you are awash in the spiritual. And, on the other hand, if you meditate in the darkness to a sufficient depth of spiritual realization, you will have to give that sense of The More some manner of actual, tangible, concrete physical expression in your life. The one calls forth the other. Neither exists apart from the other. Both are functions of reality becoming real through our experience, through our conscious awareness. We see, say, sing the universe into being. Where would either world be without our awareness of both?

We are the bridge between worlds, connecting worlds, blessing worlds, and we, in turn, are graced and blessed by our association with each. Or, we have the potential of being so blessed. It’s realization depends upon our willing, conscious, participation in the process of bridging the worlds. This process requires us to represent the physical world to the spiritual, and the spiritual to the physical. We translate, interpret, and accommodate each world within and unto the other. For instance, we understand that each world comprehends time differently. In the physical world, time is linear and sequential in a way that can be scheduled and planned. In the spiritual world, time is pregnant with meaning and wonder but the when of birth is “in its own time,” and impossible to pinpoint beyond “in the fullness of time,” or, “when the time is right.”

We have to appreciate the differences between the world of spirit and the world of matter in order to bridge the worlds and represent one to the other. We can deepen our awareness of the differences between the worlds by looking at the research being done in the area of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. If we think of the right side of the brain as being the spiritual hemisphere, and the left side of the brain as being the physical hemisphere, we will have a metaphor for how the two worlds compare and relate to one another.

Critical to our relationship with each world, to our ability to bridge the worlds, is the realization that there is nothing in it for us. We, as a species, have the age-old idea that the spiritual world is ours to plunder and pillage to benefit our life in the physical world. We think that once we learn the secret of access, within the spiritual world lie the keys to the kingdom and that, by becoming spiritual, we will have the wisdom and insight necessary to manage our affairs in the physical world to our maximum advantage. Or, we have the other idea. We think that by subjecting ourselves to the power and control of the spiritual world, by being spiritual and pure, aloof, and unscathed by the sinful “world of the flesh,” we will be kept safe until the day of resurrection when we will rise with the saints in light and be accorded royal robes and high places in the kingdom of heaven, and enjoy eternal life there to our maximum advantage. Either way, it’s the same deal. We think the spiritual world exists for our enjoyment, benefit, and glory. The truth is that is not so.

We are the bridge between worlds, the boundary between yin and yang. As such, it is our place to collaborate and cooperate with each world for the good of both. We compensate for and counteract the deficiencies of the one with the strengths of the other and so make peace between the two. We live within both worlds for the sake of each and work for the reconciliation of one with the other. We do that by perceiving, engaging and incarnating spiritual reality within the world of physical reality. There is no advantage, no benefit, no immunity, no special treatment for those who take up the work of being citizens of both worlds. What we get for our trouble is an interesting and meaningful life.

Jesus was recognized by the centurion as the son of God. The disciples understood him to be the Anointed one of God. He was hailed as Messiah (Christ): The One Who Makes God Known. This is living as a citizen of both worlds, so that those who see us see the spiritual through the physical. Now, we only come close to this in our best moments on our best days, but we all have given the world a glimpse of grace, and mercy, and peace. We have shown what we are capable of. And, of course, we have shown what we are also capable of! We have been as petty as we have been gallant, as mean-spirited as we have been gracious, as snarly and rude as we have been kind and generous. We are, indeed, citizens of both worlds, exhibiting the qualities of each in a tangled mass that makes more for confusion than for fusion, more for chaos than for peace. Our work is cut out for us.

The work is that of becoming conscious of who we are and what is ours to do, and being intentional about doing it. That work involves us in learning all we can of the invisible world in order to be agents, envoys, of that world within the visible world of normal, apparent, reality. In this endeavor, research into the right hemisphere of the brain can help us access the spiritual world. Intuition, instinct, resonance, synchronicity, numinous awareness, dreams, symbols, Freudian slips, and the like are “thin places” where the invisible world can be apprehended if not studied. We become students of these things in order to know as much as we can know of the invisible and unknown.

Okay, whoa, time to stop. Time to say right out loud that no arena of human endeavor is more replete with charlatans, swindlers, imposters, liars, cheats, cranks, creeps and ne’er-do-wells than the invisible world. Here, we move into the area of metaphysics, cosmology, parapsychology, astrology, and la-la-everything. We’re swamped, stampeded, bowled-over and undone by the kooky hoards. We don’t have a chance. This is why Orthodoxy is so comforting. There, lines have been drawn between revealed truth and speculative thrill seeking. The church of our experience may not have been all that welcoming of new ideas, but at least there were standards in place and the people were all normal. We can’t get very far from that without reaching an edge we don’t want to step over. How can we talk about knowing the invisible and unknown world without risking the loss of all bearings and coming out, if we come out at all, wearing crystals and chewing peyote?

So, here’s the first rule: Don’t take anyone’s word for anything ever, including mine. I trust Carl Jung because of his training and his experience with the unconscious world of so many people over the course of his life. He put his theories forward as theories, not facts, and he doesn’t stand to gain anything personally from our allegiance or interest. But. He said no one knows what they don’t know. Bear that in mind. And don’t take anyone’s word for anything ever when they are talking about what cannot be seen, or known.

Here’s the second rule: Question everything (Also known as: “Let the buyer beware!”). This is an area of complete and total speculation. No one knows what is unknown! No one sees what is invisible! Do not believe anything you hear! Critique! Critique! Critique! But, here is where it gets interesting. The third rule is: Keep an open mind! Be interested, alert, awake! Wonder a lot! You will find yourself on paths you can’t begin to imagine, in places you could never predict, doing things you could not have foreseen. All because you know you can’t know what you don’t know, trust yourself to the unseen, unknown, invisible world, and allow yourself to be led without a map or a compass along the way. Amen! May it be so!

Rise to the Occasion!

The movement to shift money from the big banks to credit unions and community banks is a beautiful example of how we don’t have to depend upon the government to solve the problems of bad financial management with regulations and stimulus packages. The people are savvy, and there are lots of ways to wage revolution. We have to understand that we are engaged in revolution and get with the program! Any program! Just pick a place and get to work!

The Peace and Justice Network of the Triad is a clearinghouse for information of all the local groups working the peace and justice side of the street. You’ll find their web site at www.peace-justice.net, and it won’t be long before you have more avenues for engaging in revolution than you can take on in one lifetime. It will be like selecting orange juice, or ice cream, at Harris Teeter. Too many choices, but solid evidence of how much is wrong with the way things are in the country and world, of how much needs to be done, and what people are doing in response to it. The time is always ripe for revolution!

Revolution is the work of consciousness. And it is a spiritual practice. There is nothing more counter-cultural, more subversive, than waking up, seeing, hearing and understanding—than taking on the work of squaring ourselves up with how things are and what needs to be done about it. This is the spiritual journey, task, quest: Asking What is happening? What needs to happen that is not happening? What response do we make to the situation as it arises, unfolds?

The moment is always barging into our lives to disrupt and decimate and disintegrate our cozy little world. What response do we make? As we form our response, we shape ourselves. This realization is crucial to our spiritual development. Our being flows from our doing. We are who we show ourselves to be in the responses we make to the moment of our living. What is the moment asking of us? How do we respond? There we are.

We stand naked before the world in the response we make to each moment of our living. Who we are is expressed in how we respond, how we live in response, to the moment of our living. We cannot bring forth in the moment anything that is not already within us. By bringing it forth, we make it visible, but we do not make it up. We cannot produce something that is not there to begin with, that is not within us, available to us.

If the lights go out, I have to call an electrician because I do not have what it takes to do more than flip the light switch. But, there is more within me than I know is within me, and I make amazing discoveries by getting out of my own way and allowing myself to show me what I am capable of in responding to the impact of the moment of my living. I shape myself in rising to the occasion presented by the moment. So do you. And, in this way, we become who we are over the course of our lives. We do not think our way to being who we are, we live our way there. The more consciously and thoughtfully we live, however, the more fully we become who we are.

The spiritual law at work here is this: Rise to the occasion! Be what is needed! In so doing, we will be bringing forth qualities and characteristics and abilities we don’t know we have. We have latent powers for transforming the world that languish because we will not use them, because we will not rise to the occasion, because we think we cannot do what needs to be done. We owe it to ourselves to find out what we can do and not decide without trying what we can and cannot do

We have to throw ourselves into the situation and see what we are capable of. We all suffer from an inaccurate assessment of our abilities, and with most of us, that comes out in not trying to do anything that pushes, stretches or challenges us in the least. “Oh, no,” we say, “I couldn’t do that!” And we don’t do anything, ever. We don’t think we can do anything, and don’t. We don’t know what we are capable of, and will never know if we do not begin to trust ourselves to rise to the occasion and find out, thereby, what we are made of.

So the questions: What is happening? What needs to happen that is not happening? What is the occasion that is presented by the moment as it is unfolding before us? What response shall we make in rising to the occasion? These questions throw us into the work of spiritual development which is the work of becoming conscious, the work of seeing, hearing, understanding, the work of knowing what needs to be done and doing it, the work of discovering who we are through the process of living our lives.

In this work, we square ourselves up with they way things are and also are within and without. We recognize the incompatibilities, the incongruities, the contradictions and contraries, and come to terms with them. This is true and that is also true so what response shall we make to them? What is being asked of us by the moment as it unfolds? What shall we do? What is the occasion to which we must rise?

Oh wait, don’t tell me, it’s overwhelming, right? We don’t know where to begin, right? Easy. Begin with the Peace and Justice Network of the Triad. Or join the Sierra Club. When Alan Watts asked Joseph Campbell what form his yoga took, Campbell replied, “I underline passages.” Underlining passages can be your form of revolution if you underline revolutionary passages with a revolutionary spirit! If you are overwhelmed, put that on the table along with everything else and DECIDE WHAT RESPONSE YOU WILL MAKE! Distracting yourself with addictions and diversions is not acceptable!

Consciousness stirs to life with the experience of the not-right-ness of things. Once we recognize that things are not right somehow, we can never go back to sleep. From that point on, we take up the work to square ourselves with the way things are and put things right. And our only tool in that work is consciousness, awareness.

To be conscious is to see, hear, understand, know—exactly how things are within and without. We do not hide or look away. We see what we see, hear what we hear, feel what we feel, taste what we taste, smell what we smell, sense what we sense, intuit what we intuit—we take in all that is to be taken in with every receptor we have and bear it all consciously, knowingly, in its entirety. We do not close ourselves off from or deny any aspect of our experience. This is the way things are. This is what is happening. This is what we wish were happening instead. And this is what needs to happen in response to all of these considerations.

Once we see, once we hear, once we understand, once we know, we do. Action flows naturally from knowing how things are and what needs to happen in response to how things are. Seeing is doing! Seeing and doing are being! We are as we do! Our doing, our action, shapes our being, forms who we are! We become who we are in the act of responding to what is happening in the moment of our living. Our living elicits our being, our becoming, who we are, who we are capable of being in response to what in happening in our lives. We are made, you might say, by the occasions to which we arise.

If we lived a life in which nothing happened, there would be not much to us, which is what was true of us as a species for thousands of years. There was not much to us because not much happened in our lives. Not much different anyway, not much that hadn’t always happened, that didn’t always happen. Who we are is a reflection of what is happening in our lives and how we respond to it. We are what we do, how we live. By changing the way we respond, we change who we are, we become who we are capable of being. We expand, deepen, enlarge ourselves by doing what needs to be done in response to what is happening in our lives. This is the work of consciousness, of being conscious, of seeing, hearing, understanding. This is our spiritual practice.

Our spiritual practice is revolution. Transforming ourselves and our situation in life by seeing what needs to be done and doing it. By rising to the occasion and showing ourselves who we are. There is much that is wrong with the way things are in the country and world. What are we are doing in response to it? Pick a place. Get to work. Do what needs to be done, as true revolutionaries.

God Is Always Dying!

When Jesus died everything the disciples believed about God died with him. For them, God was dead. Who the disciples had understood God to be was no more. A new understanding of God, a new God, had to come forth in their lives. With the resurrection appearances, the disciples began the work of forming a new understanding of God, of choosing a new God to serve. When the old God, the old understanding of God, dies, we must choose a new one to carry our lives forward, or we die with the old God. Enabling us to choose a new God in place of the old is the work of hermeneutics, the work of reinterpretation. Everything depends upon having the right spokespersons for God to help us find the way to the God that is God NOW.

History is weighed down with examples of tribes and civilizations that did not have such spokespersons, that did not survive the death of their god. When our understanding of God fails us, when the circumstances of our lives rule out the possibility of God as we have understood God to be, then that idea of God is dead and must be replaced with a new understanding of God for a new world. The Biblical image that applies here is Jesus’ teaching about new wine in old wineskins, and the idea expressed in the 21^st chapter of Revelation: “The old has passed away, behold, the new has come!”

When K Misenheimer says, “God doesn’t have any grandchildren,” he is saying that God only has children and that the children’s God is not the God of their parents. Thelma Foster said, “Each generation must find its own way to God.” And the God it finds its way to is not the God of the previous generation. Each generation may pay lip-service to the God of the previous generation. Each generation may sing the old hymns and recite the old creeds, but their lives are carried forward by new gods which reflect the deepest values of that generation in spite of what they may profess and declare.

Think of God as the deepest, the highest, value, or system of values, that we are capable of imagining, perceiving, serving at any particular point in our lives—the value which sets our course and directs our living, for which, and toward which, in light of which, we live. God is the personification of the highest value of a person, or a nation, or a culture. We invest ourselves in the service of our highest value, or values. In this way, we invest God with our lives. Our lives are intertwined with our values, ARE our values. Our life is the reflection, the expression, of what we value most. When you look at us, at the lives we are living, you see our God even though we may say we believe in a different God, in the God of previous generations. Or say that we have gotten rid of the God of previous generations, and do not believe in God at all.

The catch is that we must consciously CHOOSE our values! We cannot let them be handed to us, be given to us, by the church of our experience or by the culture in which we live! We cannot embrace someone else’s values as our own and serve them without examination and reflection. In that case, we become the cult of an unknown, unrecognized, God, and lose our way in the service of a God unworthy of us.

We must not think we have dumped God just because the God of our ancestors (and the church of our experience) no longer carries our highest value. Some God does. And if we do not consciously give ourselves to the God that is worthy of us—if we do not consciously serve the values that we believe are to be revered with the highest esteem—if we do not consciously choose and serve the God whose claim we recognize and to whom we declare allegiance, we will drift into the service, and will live at the mercy, of lesser gods.

This is not some new brand of theology. Paul, in Philippians (3:19) talks about those “whose end is destruction, whose god is their appetite, and whose glory is in their shame, who set their minds on earthly things.” All the rave these days, which is not unlike that of other days, is on wealth and prosperity and “creating the destiny of our dreams” (as if), and attracting the kind of life we find to be attractive. “What do you want?” is the operative question which directs our lives. Not, “What does God want?”, but “What do you want?” which elevates us to the position of God of our own lives, creating our own destiny and doing what we want. But we are not God. And the level of depression, and despair, and drug abuse, and addiction, and emptiness, and lost-ness, and meaninglessness running through our lives is testimony to the truth of our having chosen poorly “whom we will serve.” We pay a price for serving ourselves!

We cannot imagine a value beyond our desires and ambition. But, in living in light of what we want, we do not take into account the conflict of interests which torpedoes our lives. When what we want conflicts with what we also want, how do we determine what to do then? What do we want when our wants are mutually exclusive? Or when we get what we want and are not pleased? We flounder and cast about and do not know how to proceed. We sink into depression and cannot go on.

Our God has died again (as gods are wont to do when our lives do not go as we wish) and left us in the lurch. But, this god of our wants and wishes never had a chance. What we want turns out to be no god at all. Every god which is not worthy of our highest esteem always disappoints and disappears. And so, we must choose carefully the values, the God, we serve. For God is not mocked, we reap what we sew (Galatians 6:7), and bear the cost of the associations we keep.

And thus, I’m offering for your consideration, the God of the moment, the God of the here and now, because nothing is more important than the moment in which we live. When we do right by the moment, each moment, we create a foundation for the future that is built upon our service to what is right, one moment at a time. I am offering for your consideration the God of what needs to happen in the situation as it unfolds—beyond our desires and ambitions, beyond our advantage and interest, beyond our wants, wishes and happy fantasies. Here is the God that is worthy of the title, calling us to a destiny that has nothing to do with our dreams for ourselves, but was shaped for us before we were born by forces we cannot imagine, and which comes to life in the moment of our living, urging us to see and to do what needs to be done there and go where it leads, and see where it takes us.

The stakes are high here. Everything is on the line, riding on our understanding the importance of choosing values (like living aligned with our destiny) that engage us with Mystery and carry us into the hum-drum of the daily grind as though it is the stuff of myth and fable, because it is. Our task is the recovery of the sense of meaning and purpose of the moment and of our own life that lifts us above the emptiness of buying and selling, and provides us with confirmation of the special nature of our life and our place in the lives of others.

We have a calling, a vocation, a destiny! We are built, created, for a role in the salvation of the world! And, if that seems grandiose to you, what better antidote to the barrenness of the current wasteland of our souls? As it is, we have nothing but money to live for, nothing but safety and security to pin our hopes on. But ply us with luxury behind high walls and locked doors and it is not enough. We will drink ourselves to an early death or live a long miserable life around antidepressants and bridge games. We cannot give ourselves anything worthwhile to live for. All of our bright ideas come up short. Life, it turns out, is a gift from beyond!

We have a life to live that is waiting on us beyond all our ideas and dreams and wants and desires for life. We have a destiny to embrace and to serve. There is that which is right for us and for which we are right, and it may have nothing to do with what we want or with the life we have in mind for ourselves. If you are going to believe anything, believe you have a purpose beyond what you are capable of thinking up on your own!

In this, YOU are of value to God! YOU are God’s value! Your life is valuable beyond estimation when lived aligned with the destiny that is your calling, your vocation. And you cannot find your way there by yourself. But. We all know what is right for us, and what is wrong. And simply being open to what is right for us and being willing to do what is right for us puts us on the path to what is right for us.

What is right for us is what we are right for, what we are built for, cut out for. It may not be what we want for us. The difference between what is right for us and what we want for us is the fulcrum upon which our future rests. Turning away from what is right for us in favor of what we want for us puts us on a track to dissatisfaction, fragmentation, despair and death. What is right for us is often inconvenient, fearsome, difficult, and crazy. But it’s right for us. I'm not suggesting that you quit your day job and become a poet. I'm suggesting that you write poetry, if that's right for you. And I’m not suggesting that your destiny will reward you with wealth and splendor, but your life will be meaningful and interesting, and you can’t buy that with all the wealth in the world.

In taking up the path to our destiny, in doing what is right for us, we don't force anything but are open to everything. Openness finds a way. Being impatient with the process reflects a misunderstanding of the process. There is no hurry. There is no place to be by a certain time. Our destiny is more of a frame of mind, a perspective, a way of being, than it is a destination, an achievement, an accomplishment, a place. Our destiny is the path to who we are. It is who we are. There is no arrival point. We are always becoming who we are. Knowing and doing what is right for us is the way to integration, peace, wholeness, meaning, purpose, and life. And, believe it if you dare, it is the way to the salvation of the world.

Do You Believe In God?

“Do you believe in God?” she asked, with the innocence of the child she was, having heard that perhaps I didn’t. And, in the short space between her question and my answer, I thought, Which God would that be?

Would it be the God who commanded Moses, “The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” and who declared to Isaiah “My house shall become a house of prayer for all peoples”?

Or would it be the God who came up with the idea of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? Who lived by the standards “Might Makes Right!” and “The End Justifies the Means!”? Who invented genocide and the scorched earth policy? Who commanded Joshua to destroy all who lived in the Land of Promise and to show no mercy to anyone under any circumstances for any reason ever?

Would it be the God who is a harsh taskmaster, reaping and harvesting without regard for those who did the sewing and the planting?

Or the God who welcomes the weak and heavy-laden, whose yoke is easy, whose burden is light?

Would it be the God who demanded the death of God’s only son Jesus Christ our Lord as the necessary payment—the wages, you might say—for the sins of us all?

Or the God who welcomed the Prodigal home, killed the fatted calf, and held a great feast honoring his return for nothing more costly than a well-rehearsed and self-serving “I’m sorry”?

Would it be the God who sent the Army of Heaven to destroy the Great Beast and its legions for their faithless disobedience, and punish them forever in everlasting fire?

Or the God who, in the guise of a faithless Samaritan, tended the beaten Jew in the ditch and paid for his recovery without inquiring about the quality of his life or the degree to which he deserved to be so treated?

Who is the God who is God? Would the real God please stand up, come forward, and be accorded the honor of my belief, allegiance and loyalty?

And, of course, they all stand up, come forward as One, gather around and wait for me to declare myself to be their servant everlasting, for they all are God to the core. Very God of Very God. “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end, Amen!”

Here, we are in the presence of the God beyond the catechisms and confessions of faith, beyond the creeds and the doctrines, beyond the eleven o’clock worship services and the Sunday school classes and the seminary lectures and the theologies ad nauseum.

If you are going to go to the trouble of believing in God, THIS is the God to believe in, not some tame, domesticated, house-broken god who comes in on cue and exits on schedule. Not some pale, polite, patsy god stepping in the black footprints and reading from a script with predictable lines and action. Not some computer-generated god spewing out formula speeches, creating weal and making woe by the book with the title, “How To Be God.”

If you are going to believe in God, believe in the God who IS God, by god! If you dare! If you can! If you can, believe in a God who can do it all! Who can do everything! Anything! At any time! And does!

God can do anything! We are always saying that, thinking of almighty, all powerful, omnipotent—not unrestrained and without inhibitions. It’s time we revised our thinking. God is wild. Wild beyond imagining. Wild beyond the commonly recognized limits of wildness. God is irreverent, immoral and unrepentant. Impertinent, imprudent, off the wall, over the edge, out of sight. Crazy.

Nothing is off-limits with God. You have to know that about God. No holds are barred. No punches are pulled. No norms are honored. Anything goes with God. Whatever it takes with God. God will do whatever it takes.

Whatever it takes to do what? What is God's plan? What is God’s angle? What is God trying to do? I’m glad you asked. God’s plan is to do whatever is required by the situation as it arises, unfolds! What God did in the last minute doesn’t apply to what God might do in the next minute. God’s plan is to do what is needed. God doesn't rule out any possibilities. God can do, and does do, absolutely whatever the situation calls for every time.

There is no long range, much less eternal, plan with God. It’s all day-to-day, moment-to-moment, here-and-now. Each situation calls for being creatively present for the good of that situation. God lives here, now, to make this situation as good as it can be.

As you know, the situation does not cooperate with its own best interest. The situation is the result of forces and impulses, trends and preferences, that have nothing to do with God or goodness, or even good sense. Something is always coming along to destroy, decimate, devastate, demolish and disperse, and God is always reconfiguring, reshaping, reforming what God has done in order to do what needs to be done here and now in THIS mess to restore harmony and make peace and bring forth the good.

And if the good of this moment clashes with the good of the next moment, God is there to join in the work of making that moment as good as it can be. In every moment, the good is created anew, on the spot, in light of what is needed then, there. A cup of cold water. A kind word. A nap.

God turns flips, does handstands, and rejoices at length over creative responses to the need of the moment. God delights in doing whatever is required in the service of the good here and now. And if good here produces bad there, it can’t be helped, that's the way it is. God joins in the work there to produce good in the bad, loving it, loving the work.

And if one person's good in this moment clashes with another person's good in this moment, well, we have to work it out. To God’s great joy, the work is never done! In this work, God has complete freedom to do whatever it takes—whatever it takes—in the service of the good of the moment. The good of the moment is the only good, and that good has nothing to do with preconceived notions of good but with what needs to happen then, there. It all comes into being in each moment to serve that moment.

And Jesus? A chip off the old block! Jesus raised the dead and left the dead to bury the dead! He forgave a guilty woman and cursed an innocent fig tree. Jesus did whatever the situation required as it unfolded—healing on the Sabbath one day, and refusing to give an "evil and adulterous generation" a sign the next day. You never know what Jesus will do when.

You never know with Jesus, or with God, or with YOU! YOU are completely free to do what needs to be done in the situation as it arises, and must, if you would join God in being as God is! This is the work of God: Doing what needs to be done in the situation as it arises, unfolds, no matter what!

Not even God can do more than that! God on God's best day cannot do more than what needs to be done in the situation as it arises, unfolds. You'll never hear a truth that is truer than this truth. But hold on, it gets better.

When I/you/we all do what needs to be done in the situation as it arises, unfolds, in the time and place of our living, we are as God-like as God can be, which is what Jesus was in being the Christ, a term that means “The Anointed One.” Anointed for what? For making God known, present, real! When we pull off being what the moment is dying for, we are the Christ as only we can be the Christ, and God becomes known, present, real in our lives and in the world in that moment.

In order to do what needs to be done and make God known, present, real in the situation as it unfolds in the moment of our living, we have to get ourselves out of the way. The only thing standing between us and God, us and the Christ, is us. We are our own worst enemy. And so, the question, Whose side are you on? is always the question. And the right answer is always: Thy will not mine be done!

What, then, is God’s will here, now? To see the good and do it! To know what is being asked of us, what is striving to come forth here, now and DO the thing! To be done with convention, with shrewd, crafty, wily ways, with covering our bases and counting the cost! What needs to be done in the situation as it arises, unfolds? DO IT! Here! Now!

In this way, every moment is the first moment of creation! Every situation offers the possibility of a fresh, “Let there be!” So, let it be! Let it be!

When we live to serve the good of the moment, of the situation as it arises, unfolds, we are not serving OUR good in the moment, or guided by our wishes, desires, ambition, fears. Freedom is being not bound to our wants, interests, tastes, preferences, anxieties, goals, plans, intentions... The freedom to do what needs to be done in the situation as it arises is complete freedom. It doesn’t get freer than that! And if God is anything, God is free—to be and to do whatever is needed in the situation as it arises, unfolds!

So, of course, I said, “Of course I believe in God! Who wouldn’t believe in a God as wild and alive as God? May we all be so wild and alive forever!” Indeed! May we be so!