Monthly Archives: September 2018

Eastern Christianity

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Eastern Christianity

September 9 – September 14, 2018

The Cappadocian Fathers developed an intellectual rationale for Christianity’s central
goal: humanity’s healing and loving union with God. (Sunday)

Matter and Spirit must be found to be inseparable in Christ before we have the courage and
insight to acknowledge and honor the same in ourselves and in the entire universe.

Christ is the Archetype of Everything.
(Monday)

Just as some Eastern fathers saw Christ’s human/divine nature as one dynamic unity,
they also saw the Trinity as an Infinite Dynamic Flow. (Tuesday)

St. Gregory of Nazianzus emphasized that deification does not mean we become God,
but that we do objectively participate in God’s nature. We are created to share in the life-flow
of Trinity. (Wednesday)

[Gregory of Nyssa taught universal salvation from] a fundamental belief in
the impermanence of evil in the face of God’s love and a conviction that God’s plan for humanity
is intended to be fulfilled in every single human being. —Morwenna Ludlow (Thursday)

The Eastern Fathers have always stressed . . . that if we are in Christ we participate
in His paschal victory over sin and death. —George Maloney (Friday)

 

Two Roles of Religion

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Let me begin with one of my favorite passages from the brilliant philosopher Ken Wilber:

. . . Religion itself has always performed two very important, but very different functions. One, it acts as a way of creating meaning for the separate self: it offers myths and stories and tales and narratives and rituals that, taken together, help the separate self make sense of, and endure, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. This function of religion does not usually or necessarily change the level of consciousness in a person; it does not deliver radical transformation. Nor does it deliver a shattering liberation from the separate self altogether. Rather, it consoles the self, fortifies the self, defends the self, promotes the self. As long as the separate self believes the myths, performs the rituals, mouths the prayers, or embraces the dogma, then the self, it is fervently believed, will be “saved”—either now in the glory of being God-saved or Goddess-favored, or in an afterlife that ensures eternal wonderment.

But two, religion has also served—in a usually very, very small minority—the function of radical transformation and liberation. This function of religion does not fortify the separate self, but utterly shatters it—not consolation but devastation, not entrenchment but emptiness, not complacency but explosion, not comfort but revolution—in short, not a conventional bolstering of consciousness but a radical transmutation and transformation at the deepest seat of consciousness itself. [1]

This second function is the ultimate goal of all mature spirituality. This is the contemplative dimension of religion. As Thomas Keating says, “The primary purpose of religion is to help us move beyond the separate-self sense to union with God.” [2]

In the weeks ahead, we will focus on the transformational level of the Abrahamic religions where God is central and the goal is to be transformed into God’s likeness, rather than what I would call the transactional level where our ego or false self is central and we are trying to control God.

 

[1] Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality (Shambhala Publications, Inc.: 2000), 25-26.

[2] Thomas Keating and Joseph Boyle with Lucette Verboven, World Without End (Bloomsbury Continuum: 2017), 24.

 

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Rhor’s meditation

Early Christianity

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Early Christianity

Seeking Spiritual Freedom

Thursday, September 6, 2018

A brother was restless in the community and often moved to anger. So he said: “I will go, and live somewhere by myself. And since I shall be able to talk or listen to no one, I shall be tranquil, and my passionate anger will cease.” He went out and lived alone in a cave. But one day he filled his jug with water and put it on the ground. It happened suddenly to fall over. He filled it again, and again it fell. And this happened a third time. And in a rage he snatched up the jug and broke it. Returning to his right mind, he knew that the demon of anger had mocked him, and he said: “Here am I by myself, and he has beaten me. I will return to the community. Wherever you live, you need effort and patience and above all God’s help.” —Story of a desert father [1]

As the Christian church moved from bottom to top, protected and pampered by the Roman Empire, people like Anthony of the Desert (c. 250-c. 356), John Cassian (c. 360-c. 435), Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345-399), Syncletica (c. 270-c. 350) and other early Christians went off to the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria to find spiritual freedom, live out Jesus’ teachings, and continue growing in the Spirit. It was in these deserts that a different mind called contemplation was taught.

As an alternative to empire and its economy, these men and women emphasized lifestyle practice, psychologically astute methods of prayer, and a very simple spirituality of transformation into Christ. The desert communities grew out of informal gatherings of monks or nuns, functioning much like families. A good number also became hermits to mine the deep mystery of their inner experience. This movement paralleled the monastic pattern in Hinduism and Buddhism.

The desert tradition preceded the emergence of systematic theology and formal doctrine. Christian faith was first a lifestyle before it was a belief system. Since the desert dwellers were often formally uneducated, they told stories, much like Jesus did, to teach about essential issues of ego, love, virtue, surrender, peace, divine union, and inner freedom.

Thomas Merton described those early Christians in the wilderness as people “who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a decadent state,” who didn’t wish to be ruled or to rule. He continues, saying that they primarily sought their “true self, in Christ”; to do so, they had to reject “the false, formal self, fabricated under social compulsion ‘in the world.’ They sought a way to God that was uncharted and freely chosen, not inherited from others who had mapped it out beforehand.” [2] Can you see why we might need to learn from them?

References:
[1] Western Asceticism, ed., trans. Owen Chadwick (Westminster John Knox Press: 2006, ©1958), 92.

[2] Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert(New Directions: 1960), 5-6.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer(Paulist Press: 2014), 51; and
“Desert Christianity and the Eastern Fathers of the Church,” The Mendicant, vol. 5, no. 2 (Center for Action and Contemplation: April 2015), 1.