Last night my husband said, the message Jesus brought says love – love each other is the main thing he taught – yet the churches seem to say: but only within prescribed limits. Only within your marriage.
To elaborate on that, it is supposed that there is one kind of strong love that should occur only within the confines of the marriage bed, another kind of strong love for family and some close friends, and then a sort of a weak, diffused love for everyone else.
He and I are working out a different paradigm. We have identified two planes in which the thought of love plays out. One of them is the plane of pure energy exchange. The other is the plane of temporal negotiation. Both planes are valid in their own right. The shift from one plane to another can happen quickly and without being noticed. Confusion about what plane one is operating on causes all kinds of problems.
The plane of pure energy exchange is the one in which one life form recognizes another, sees the deep and shining soul within, and rejoices. This is the plane of the brilliant smile of a stranger on the street, and it is the plane of “namaste” – the divine in me salutes the divine in you. When such an exchange occurs freely, both participants go away enriched. They are affirmed in two ways: one, by sending out a shining signal, and two, by being recognized as shining. This kind of exchange can be a deep blessing, sending out ripples of joy through succeeding interactions. And I believe it’s fair to call such an exchange an act of love – of loving and being loved.
The plane of temporal negotiation is the one in which people ask, what am I to you? Will you be there for me? It is the one in which they seek to define what the relationship is in time, in the course of lives as they play out. This kind of understanding is important. It takes many loops of feedback to come to clear communication, to find the common language and an agreement of expectations. It can only happen successfully when both people are committed to making it happen.
Here are some examples of how these planes get confused: Someone shoots a smile at a person, and she wonders, is he coming on to me? Would I be leading him on to smile back, would I be sending the wrong signal? Because she’s confusing the pure energy exchange with a temporal negotiation, she feels the need to mask her natural response of joy towards another life form. Thus the exchange doesn’t happen, and the world gets a little colder. Another example: Someone shoots a smile at a person, and she thinks, he has no right to smile at me. He can’t follow through with a relationship, and I wouldn’t want him to do so. Men are so arrogant, thinking they have the right to have any relationship they want to. So she gives him a dirty look back, to make sure he knows that she will not be entering into relationship with him. Again, the energy exchange doesn’t happen, and life is not as delightful as it could have been. I use these examples because, as a woman, I have experienced both these states. I expect the examples told from a male perspective would sound a little different, but I’m not so intimately in tune with them to pull them up.
The planes can also get confused in the other direction, where someone thinks that, because there has been an energy exchange between the two of them, something is owed, obligation is incurred, an agreement for temporal relationship has been made. Or it can be confused when someone thinks they can do things that have consequences in the temporal plane without entering into relationship.
It has consequences in the temporal plane to say you’ll be there for someone. It has consequences in the temporal plane to make a baby with someone. It can have consequences in the temporal plane to get to a certain level of intimacy with someone, and that level may vary from person to person. This is why very deliberate communication is important in the negotiation of temporal relationships. An energy exchange does not signal a temporal relationship. It also doesn’t preclude one. Temporal relationships are built on the communication that explores these issues.
Meanwhile, I think it’s of crucial importance in the world that we not confine our love to temporal relationships. We must love in every way – in the way that treasures and holds up each life form, in the way that offers quick aid without obligation, in the way that allows us to be graceful and loving in our dealings with others.
It has been supposed that such exchanges should only be from the neck up – share a nice smile, but don’t get too involved. Feel it down to your heart maybe, but don’t feel it in your gut, don’t feel it to the core of your being. Don’t feel turned inside out, turned on, transformed. Save those deep feelings for your temporal relationships. But I believe that is not so. If it were, the love that Jesus tells us to do would be a dull duty, a tiresome obligation.
What distinguishes an energy exchange from a temporal relationship is not its depth, but simply its continuity through the plane of time. An energy exchange can be rockingly deep. It just incurs no obligations. It can be reciprocal, but the love is given unilaterally, with no expectation of a temporal relationship. It is given from the nature of who we are, because it’s what we are made of.
An energy exchange can also be practical and kind. It can help and bless someone (and when it does, it blesses both, by the law of balance.) It can be the stranger who changes your flat tire, the man who walks a mile with you to show you the way.
Does that sound familiar? Love one another, say yes to the core of each other, be rocked, transformed by each other. That’s how you’ll know that you’re his disciples, he says. I don’t think there are two kinds of love. There’s one kind of love, and if you do it, you’re going to feel it, and it’s going to feel fine. No temporal obligations, but deep aliveness and satisfaction. I don’t think it’s sacrilegious. Christ says yes.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Christ says yes
Last fall I went on a retreat with a group of friends from several different Christian denominations. We broke bread, shared stories, sang hymns (sometimes each using our own words to a familiar tune), prayed together, and drew closer.
At this retreat I kept thinking how the Christ says yes. Though we may have thought our upbringing was defined by a framework of nos – things we’re not supposed to do or be – in fact the way Christ defines us is by saying yes to what we are – yes to what we always have been. When we are recognized as what we are, what we have always hoped about ourselves leaps out as truth to us. We feel affirmed, validated, loved. This is how the Christ heals – by affirming that which we always have been but didn’t dare to believe could be true: our perfection in the purpose of God. So in my earnest desire to follow Christ, I took on this assignment: No more nos. Be one who says yes to people. Yes to who they are, yes to this unique expression of God, yes to their soul’s desire to be seen and loved.
Our surroundings were a wedding of sea and farmland, with a garden for the songbirds, a steep bluff for the raptors, and a great shallow bay for all the sea birds – herons, loons, gulls. This place was as much a teacher as we all were to each other. Here is something I wrote about it:
The change in experience that results from the touch of Christ is as instant as the change in the water at the touch of light. The majestic liquid transparency, the sudden subtlety of color that appears in the place of inscrutable gray, can touch the whole surface of the water at once. The unique beauty of each moment, in the myriad faces of the water, always present and always revealed in the now, is seen whenever we look. So it is that the Christ is always present, and transforms our experience – not just the surface of it, but the whole depth of it – all that ever was, all that can unfold. Thanks to the Creator for all light – “Light baptizes life.”
Last weekend I was there again, with a different mix of people but with the same intention. Again the Christ spoke to me, and the land spoke to me in the same words; the water voiced the truth about Love, and in people’s prayers for me came the message: Just let yourself be loved. I’m not sure how to do that, yet, as a daily practice. But I did feel loved by the warm sand and the gentle wind. I did feel the comfort of being exactly what the Creator intends me to be – the grace in my steps and the joy that stretched to my fingertips. I need to learn what it means in the dance of interaction with people – a lesson I look forward to.
At this retreat I kept thinking how the Christ says yes. Though we may have thought our upbringing was defined by a framework of nos – things we’re not supposed to do or be – in fact the way Christ defines us is by saying yes to what we are – yes to what we always have been. When we are recognized as what we are, what we have always hoped about ourselves leaps out as truth to us. We feel affirmed, validated, loved. This is how the Christ heals – by affirming that which we always have been but didn’t dare to believe could be true: our perfection in the purpose of God. So in my earnest desire to follow Christ, I took on this assignment: No more nos. Be one who says yes to people. Yes to who they are, yes to this unique expression of God, yes to their soul’s desire to be seen and loved.
Our surroundings were a wedding of sea and farmland, with a garden for the songbirds, a steep bluff for the raptors, and a great shallow bay for all the sea birds – herons, loons, gulls. This place was as much a teacher as we all were to each other. Here is something I wrote about it:
The change in experience that results from the touch of Christ is as instant as the change in the water at the touch of light. The majestic liquid transparency, the sudden subtlety of color that appears in the place of inscrutable gray, can touch the whole surface of the water at once. The unique beauty of each moment, in the myriad faces of the water, always present and always revealed in the now, is seen whenever we look. So it is that the Christ is always present, and transforms our experience – not just the surface of it, but the whole depth of it – all that ever was, all that can unfold. Thanks to the Creator for all light – “Light baptizes life.”
Last weekend I was there again, with a different mix of people but with the same intention. Again the Christ spoke to me, and the land spoke to me in the same words; the water voiced the truth about Love, and in people’s prayers for me came the message: Just let yourself be loved. I’m not sure how to do that, yet, as a daily practice. But I did feel loved by the warm sand and the gentle wind. I did feel the comfort of being exactly what the Creator intends me to be – the grace in my steps and the joy that stretched to my fingertips. I need to learn what it means in the dance of interaction with people – a lesson I look forward to.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Love heals the past
Finding my voice, finding my walk, I feel the ground under me firmer than before. I feel the shifting balance of my footfall, a dance of centeredness – all the steps connected together into one motion – kinetic energy from the ground, up my stride, through my core and down to the other side. No longer step step step but one continuous wave.
I feel like I’m a grown-up now. Now after all these years of playing at adulthood, I feel the ability to take in the input and let it be folded into the wave of my motion – to respond not like a ping pong paddle but like a sling – pulling the energy in, cradling it, turning it, releasing it in a soaring arc, giving what needs to be given.
Is it possible that I could have been incomplete all this time, a being whose circuitry was not finished, the arc of whose power would always stop before its effect could be realized? Maybe it’s part of the completeness to also realize that no one was ever broken, not even me. In all the broken circumstances of human affairs, Life still has the power to complete its arc and establish its circuitry.
And so the world becomes whole. Each organism already moves in the way of all living. Like the delicate swirls of a smoke tendril folding in again and again on itself, making visible the air currents that always move in one continuous wave, so the Love that is Life connects us continually.
I wrote this in a rapid writing exercise in a writer’s group for the Occasional Times, a newsletter by and for homeless women. I started volunteering there more than a year ago, and from the start felt grateful to be allowed to be there. I had not earned the right, through heartbreak or family legacy, to be among the homeless – not faced the gritty issues of bleak survival head-on, not come to the place where making a choice between untenable things was a daily demand. I was allowed to be there and let my comprehension of humanity expand, and to see that, contrary to the tales told on the surface of society, grace is everywhere.
Now I no longer feel like an intruder. Not just because of the many issues of the Newsletter that we’ve put out together, but also because I, too, have been on a journey, and I find many of the landmarks to be the same. In the group where I wrote about finding my voice, another woman shared an account of healing – an unmistakable testament to the law of Love. Through her courage and her trust in God, she found reconciliation with her past, which entailed the embrace of the person she is and forgiveness towards the forces that shaped her. Part of her healing was in her writing, because she was using her own voice, for herself – not needing for the right person to be able to receive her message; just telling it because it was true. In that act of truthfulness, her voice turned out to speak for others at the table. It wasn’t that she tried to do so, it’s just that that is the way telling the truth works.
When I wrote about how love heals the past, I wrote it for me, not in any attempt to be universal. Yet the others at the table found resonance with what I wrote. No one was ever broken, only human affairs are broken. Life still establishes its circuitry. Grace is everywhere.
I feel like I’m a grown-up now. Now after all these years of playing at adulthood, I feel the ability to take in the input and let it be folded into the wave of my motion – to respond not like a ping pong paddle but like a sling – pulling the energy in, cradling it, turning it, releasing it in a soaring arc, giving what needs to be given.
Is it possible that I could have been incomplete all this time, a being whose circuitry was not finished, the arc of whose power would always stop before its effect could be realized? Maybe it’s part of the completeness to also realize that no one was ever broken, not even me. In all the broken circumstances of human affairs, Life still has the power to complete its arc and establish its circuitry.
And so the world becomes whole. Each organism already moves in the way of all living. Like the delicate swirls of a smoke tendril folding in again and again on itself, making visible the air currents that always move in one continuous wave, so the Love that is Life connects us continually.
I wrote this in a rapid writing exercise in a writer’s group for the Occasional Times, a newsletter by and for homeless women. I started volunteering there more than a year ago, and from the start felt grateful to be allowed to be there. I had not earned the right, through heartbreak or family legacy, to be among the homeless – not faced the gritty issues of bleak survival head-on, not come to the place where making a choice between untenable things was a daily demand. I was allowed to be there and let my comprehension of humanity expand, and to see that, contrary to the tales told on the surface of society, grace is everywhere.
Now I no longer feel like an intruder. Not just because of the many issues of the Newsletter that we’ve put out together, but also because I, too, have been on a journey, and I find many of the landmarks to be the same. In the group where I wrote about finding my voice, another woman shared an account of healing – an unmistakable testament to the law of Love. Through her courage and her trust in God, she found reconciliation with her past, which entailed the embrace of the person she is and forgiveness towards the forces that shaped her. Part of her healing was in her writing, because she was using her own voice, for herself – not needing for the right person to be able to receive her message; just telling it because it was true. In that act of truthfulness, her voice turned out to speak for others at the table. It wasn’t that she tried to do so, it’s just that that is the way telling the truth works.
When I wrote about how love heals the past, I wrote it for me, not in any attempt to be universal. Yet the others at the table found resonance with what I wrote. No one was ever broken, only human affairs are broken. Life still establishes its circuitry. Grace is everywhere.
My love is my own; my love is for you all
Like many people (judging from stories and the way they talk) I grew up thinking that love is something that’s negotiated between people. I went around with a desire to love, looking for some kind of a permission – someone to love me back, some sense of spark that if I were to shoot an arc of love across, the circuitry would be completed in another person, and we would be in love.
There was a boy I knew who seemed promising in this regard. A few glances, a few things said to each other, seemed to me like connected circuitry. It was like a promise that there could be more – that we could have this kind of relationship. My hope was encouraged by a few near misses, and I came, perhaps largely through constructs of my imagination, to believe that we were soul mates.
Life happened differently. We never did have a real relationship with each other, and I went on to other loves, marriage, family. But deep in thought, I still held that unfinished connection. I still had a little fantasy that somehow the courses of our lives would change and we would come together. I would occasionally have dreams about him, but they were always marked by his absence. I would be among people he knew, or in a house that was his, and I was thinking I might see him, but I never did. Then last spring I had a dream in which I did see him, and he offered to take me sailing. The offer still wasn’t fulfilled in the dream, but the fact that it was made was very satisfying to me.
After I woke up, I had a realization from that dream. It was that the piece of unfinished connection that I felt wasn’t what I had thought it was. It wasn’t a sign from fate that some part of my destiny had been tragically unfulfilled. It wasn’t a very foolish construct in my mind where I was imagining something that was never there. It didn’t even have anything to do with the person in question. It was something I had done, and it was an act of love. I had opened my heart to whatever this person was, and had kept it open. It was something I could do any time, for anyone. It didn’t require their permission or participation. When I realized that this was so, I felt the circuit connect itself in me, and I was aware of the power of my love, and that it is a good thing for me to do. I was also able to feel an unfettered love for this man, and for his wife and kids whom I’d never met. There was no need for me to be involved in their lives at all. It just was.
Last summer, while on vacation, I did see this man again, and did meet his wife and kids. We talked for maybe about fifteen minutes. It felt very satisfying to do so. The next day I took a bike ride, in the fresh-washed after-storm early morning, along the seaside and through the town and out across the fields to the beach, where I was the only one there with the brilliant blue of sky, clouds, and water. I walked, holy and barefoot, on the beach, and received a compelling message from the vastness about the nature and presence of God.
Then I went back to my bike and rode home. All the way riding, in both directions, I felt a big halo of amazing love all around me. It was like a golden sphere around me, that I could almost see.
It stayed with me for days, though it was sometimes under the surface. In fact, in a way, it never left. I brought it home with me, and in time shared the experience with my husband. Through the course of months it has contributed to a great deepening of our intimacy and love. And I’ve found that the love is a presence I can use. I can hold others in it, I can give it to them, I can use it for healing. It’s not just the love that came from that one experience. That experience taught me about the present and available source for all love. The words that I have for it are: my love is my own. It’s not something I have to negotiate with others for. My love is my own, I’m free to give it, I do it for myself and not to incur favor or obligation or even relationship. I do it because it is what I am made to do – it is what I am made of.
And because my love is my own, it is also free. It is for all of you – you can have it without obligation. You don’t have to pay for it; you don’t owe me anything back. It’s not the opening salvo for negotiations about a relationship. It’s simply the truth about who I am.
Christian Science teaches that God is Love, and that man is the reflection of God. From this it follows that love is our essence, and that God is the source of it. It makes sense, from this, that we should love naturally, reflexively, simply as the expression of our being. And I like knowing that this love is not theoretical, but real and satisfying in every sense.
There was a boy I knew who seemed promising in this regard. A few glances, a few things said to each other, seemed to me like connected circuitry. It was like a promise that there could be more – that we could have this kind of relationship. My hope was encouraged by a few near misses, and I came, perhaps largely through constructs of my imagination, to believe that we were soul mates.
Life happened differently. We never did have a real relationship with each other, and I went on to other loves, marriage, family. But deep in thought, I still held that unfinished connection. I still had a little fantasy that somehow the courses of our lives would change and we would come together. I would occasionally have dreams about him, but they were always marked by his absence. I would be among people he knew, or in a house that was his, and I was thinking I might see him, but I never did. Then last spring I had a dream in which I did see him, and he offered to take me sailing. The offer still wasn’t fulfilled in the dream, but the fact that it was made was very satisfying to me.
After I woke up, I had a realization from that dream. It was that the piece of unfinished connection that I felt wasn’t what I had thought it was. It wasn’t a sign from fate that some part of my destiny had been tragically unfulfilled. It wasn’t a very foolish construct in my mind where I was imagining something that was never there. It didn’t even have anything to do with the person in question. It was something I had done, and it was an act of love. I had opened my heart to whatever this person was, and had kept it open. It was something I could do any time, for anyone. It didn’t require their permission or participation. When I realized that this was so, I felt the circuit connect itself in me, and I was aware of the power of my love, and that it is a good thing for me to do. I was also able to feel an unfettered love for this man, and for his wife and kids whom I’d never met. There was no need for me to be involved in their lives at all. It just was.
Last summer, while on vacation, I did see this man again, and did meet his wife and kids. We talked for maybe about fifteen minutes. It felt very satisfying to do so. The next day I took a bike ride, in the fresh-washed after-storm early morning, along the seaside and through the town and out across the fields to the beach, where I was the only one there with the brilliant blue of sky, clouds, and water. I walked, holy and barefoot, on the beach, and received a compelling message from the vastness about the nature and presence of God.
Then I went back to my bike and rode home. All the way riding, in both directions, I felt a big halo of amazing love all around me. It was like a golden sphere around me, that I could almost see.
It stayed with me for days, though it was sometimes under the surface. In fact, in a way, it never left. I brought it home with me, and in time shared the experience with my husband. Through the course of months it has contributed to a great deepening of our intimacy and love. And I’ve found that the love is a presence I can use. I can hold others in it, I can give it to them, I can use it for healing. It’s not just the love that came from that one experience. That experience taught me about the present and available source for all love. The words that I have for it are: my love is my own. It’s not something I have to negotiate with others for. My love is my own, I’m free to give it, I do it for myself and not to incur favor or obligation or even relationship. I do it because it is what I am made to do – it is what I am made of.
And because my love is my own, it is also free. It is for all of you – you can have it without obligation. You don’t have to pay for it; you don’t owe me anything back. It’s not the opening salvo for negotiations about a relationship. It’s simply the truth about who I am.
Christian Science teaches that God is Love, and that man is the reflection of God. From this it follows that love is our essence, and that God is the source of it. It makes sense, from this, that we should love naturally, reflexively, simply as the expression of our being. And I like knowing that this love is not theoretical, but real and satisfying in every sense.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Absent from the Body?
Here’s a quote from 2 Corinthians 5:
“Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: (For we walk by faith, not by sight:) We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.”
I like the idea of being “present with the Lord,” but I think I’ve been, at times, rendered ineffectual by confusion of the meaning of being absent from the body. The phrase could be associated with out-of-body experiences, or it could mean that we’re supposed to cultivate an unfeeling state, stolid and stoic, and consort only with our concept of God, which we might assume would reside in our heads. We would read the words in our holy books and not try to associate too much with the experience of the world, since, presumably, we’d take in this information through our bodies, from which we desired to be absent. In our efforts to “translate things into thoughts” we would trade the vibrant, colorful, fragrant world for dusty, abstract, concepts. This would give us a God that we could have intellectual ideas about, but not a God we could really feel.
This can’t be what is meant by the phrase. If our purpose were actually to have no relations with things in the physical world, why would physical healing be part of our ministry? Why would we care what our body was manifesting, if we are supposed to be absent from it anyway?
So it must mean something other than that. Here are some things that shed light on the subject:
Immanuel means “God within.” Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is within you.” If God is omnipresent, it can’t mean that God is present up to the boundary of our skins, and then there is the part where God isn’t because our bodies are there. God is law, and law permeates and pervades everything. In fact, it’s not just that God permeates and pervades everything – it’s that God is what is. There’s no “everything” first which God then permeates and pervades; everything is within the being of God, and so is subject to God’s law.
So we, here and now, in the place that we may think of as “in our bodies,” are the manifestation of God. Here where we feel joy, where we delight in beauty, where our hearts swell with love, is where we experience God. Here where we walk in our own centered balance, and speak in our own centered truth, we are present with the Lord. We don’t know God by absenting ourselves from all of the glory that is Life – we know God by being Life’s expression, with all the strength, agility, beauty, sensitivity and love that entails.
So what are we to be absent from? More and more I’m seeing that we are to be absent from complaint. What we perceive as our body is a fine instrument for expressing the glory of God, but when it wants to turn around and tell us it needs certain conditions met in order for it to experience or express goodness, it is out of line. If God is creator, and God is good, then good is here now, and there are no conditions on it. If we are present with the Lord, we are aware that good is here now. I think Paul’s sense of being “at home in the body” is the sense of being at the beck and call of all the body’s complaints. I think from this place we can’t be aware of God’s continual goodness, because we’re assuming it’s not there until conditions by the body are met.
Mrs. Eddy says the intercommunication is always from God to man. This to me is a clue that we receive the knowledge of God right where we are, right in what we perceive as our bodies, and we feel present in that goodness, right in our bodies. But the body doesn’t get to be the determiner of anything – it doesn’t get to send information back. This makes sense, since there isn’t any place in consciousness we can go where God isn’t. So there isn’t any source of information or communication other than goodness.
Mrs. Eddy also writes: “If we look to the body for pleasure, we find pain; for Life, we find death; for Truth, we find error; for Spirit, we find its opposite, matter. Now reverse this action. Look away from the body into Truth and Love, the Principle of all happiness, harmony, and immortality. Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts.” I think this means look away not in a spatial sense. Look into Truth and Love not in a different place from where our body is. But look at Truth and Love right where we are, right as we experience it in what we think of as our bodies. Look away from complaint or a sense that there are conditions to be met before goodness is present. Consider that the divine cause establishes everything that we are, including our bodies. Then we will exude the health and glory which are God’s plan for us.
“Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: (For we walk by faith, not by sight:) We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.”
I like the idea of being “present with the Lord,” but I think I’ve been, at times, rendered ineffectual by confusion of the meaning of being absent from the body. The phrase could be associated with out-of-body experiences, or it could mean that we’re supposed to cultivate an unfeeling state, stolid and stoic, and consort only with our concept of God, which we might assume would reside in our heads. We would read the words in our holy books and not try to associate too much with the experience of the world, since, presumably, we’d take in this information through our bodies, from which we desired to be absent. In our efforts to “translate things into thoughts” we would trade the vibrant, colorful, fragrant world for dusty, abstract, concepts. This would give us a God that we could have intellectual ideas about, but not a God we could really feel.
This can’t be what is meant by the phrase. If our purpose were actually to have no relations with things in the physical world, why would physical healing be part of our ministry? Why would we care what our body was manifesting, if we are supposed to be absent from it anyway?
So it must mean something other than that. Here are some things that shed light on the subject:
Immanuel means “God within.” Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is within you.” If God is omnipresent, it can’t mean that God is present up to the boundary of our skins, and then there is the part where God isn’t because our bodies are there. God is law, and law permeates and pervades everything. In fact, it’s not just that God permeates and pervades everything – it’s that God is what is. There’s no “everything” first which God then permeates and pervades; everything is within the being of God, and so is subject to God’s law.
So we, here and now, in the place that we may think of as “in our bodies,” are the manifestation of God. Here where we feel joy, where we delight in beauty, where our hearts swell with love, is where we experience God. Here where we walk in our own centered balance, and speak in our own centered truth, we are present with the Lord. We don’t know God by absenting ourselves from all of the glory that is Life – we know God by being Life’s expression, with all the strength, agility, beauty, sensitivity and love that entails.
So what are we to be absent from? More and more I’m seeing that we are to be absent from complaint. What we perceive as our body is a fine instrument for expressing the glory of God, but when it wants to turn around and tell us it needs certain conditions met in order for it to experience or express goodness, it is out of line. If God is creator, and God is good, then good is here now, and there are no conditions on it. If we are present with the Lord, we are aware that good is here now. I think Paul’s sense of being “at home in the body” is the sense of being at the beck and call of all the body’s complaints. I think from this place we can’t be aware of God’s continual goodness, because we’re assuming it’s not there until conditions by the body are met.
Mrs. Eddy says the intercommunication is always from God to man. This to me is a clue that we receive the knowledge of God right where we are, right in what we perceive as our bodies, and we feel present in that goodness, right in our bodies. But the body doesn’t get to be the determiner of anything – it doesn’t get to send information back. This makes sense, since there isn’t any place in consciousness we can go where God isn’t. So there isn’t any source of information or communication other than goodness.
Mrs. Eddy also writes: “If we look to the body for pleasure, we find pain; for Life, we find death; for Truth, we find error; for Spirit, we find its opposite, matter. Now reverse this action. Look away from the body into Truth and Love, the Principle of all happiness, harmony, and immortality. Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts.” I think this means look away not in a spatial sense. Look into Truth and Love not in a different place from where our body is. But look at Truth and Love right where we are, right as we experience it in what we think of as our bodies. Look away from complaint or a sense that there are conditions to be met before goodness is present. Consider that the divine cause establishes everything that we are, including our bodies. Then we will exude the health and glory which are God’s plan for us.
Good Friday and the Cross
I participated in an ecumenical Good Friday service last week, which was very inspiring. The bulk of the service was done by lay members of various congregations. The person that led the Call to Worship said, (and I paraphrase) It seems it was only moments ago that we were spreading palms and singing Hosanna. Now we are at this moment, where things have taken such a different turn - betrayal, desertion, crucifixion . . .
And I thought, wow, so that's the thing. In other times when I've expected the next step to be the crowning culmination of success, and it hasn't come to pass, maybe it's actually following a different pattern. Maybe the cross is, as Mary Baker Eddy says, the central emblem of history. Maybe the challenge of the cross is to realize that it isn't the disposal of human events that establishes reality. It is the ever-present consciousness of the present divine order, the governing hand of Love, that establishes it. The people who put palms down for Jesus probably thought he was the saving king who would free them from the Roman yoke. Or at least that his power, as demonstrated by his healing works, would rise to the place of banishing all oppression. They didn't know that the greater work of the Messiah was to go into all the fractal paths of human thought and set everything right - to establish an order of peace that was universal because its underpinnings were internal - that it was the law of Love governing every cell of being, thus establishing pure individuals whose natural course is to engage lovingly with each other. Taking up the cross, then, would be the willingness to stand up for the goodness of being in every instance where it is challenged.
My part in the Good Friday service was to read Luke 23: 44-56, and then do a meditation on the phrase "Father, Into thy hands I commend my spirit." Here's what I shared:
“Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.”
Jesus commends his spirit to God. He entrusts God with all that he is. He does so in the acknowledgment that his spirit is good – worthy of commendation. There is no doubt about this in his expression. He simultaneously establishes the worthiness of himself and the trustworthiness of God.
Jesus lets go. He lets go of all the machinations of the world, all the politics, all the sordid soul-selling that led to the conspiracy to put him to death. He lets go of the need to teach anymore, to explain anymore, to make the people understand. He commends his spirit to God – he trusts God to take care of everything that he is – his life, his purpose, his mission.
Jesus cries to his Father. His relationship with God is unbroken. All that he is is established by this relationship – the son who can do nothing of himself, but who always does what the Father tells him. He is always motivated by Spirit, the creative power that gives the impulse of life to the whole universe, and the impulse of love to everything moving in Spirit’s consciousness. This allows him, in this most dark time, to release any sense of responsibility for what will happen, and let Spirit work to establish its unbroken harmony.
Jesus is our way-shower. We are his disciples, and his friends, if we do what he commands, and he commands that we follow him. We follow him not so much by suffering as by allowing God, Life and Love, to lift us out. We can do this with each smaller despair, each human heartbreak, each place where things seem hopeless. We can commend our spirit to God.
We can let go of the sense that we have to explain things, set things right, figure them out, bring all guilty parties to justice. We can let go even of the grief and the pain and the disappointment with events of the world. We can commend our spirit to God, with the confidence that, even if we don’t know exactly who we are, God knows. God made us, God loves us, and God will teach us what we are. God will prepare the table before us. In the end, the circumstances of our lives don’t get to have the last word about what we are.
And I thought, wow, so that's the thing. In other times when I've expected the next step to be the crowning culmination of success, and it hasn't come to pass, maybe it's actually following a different pattern. Maybe the cross is, as Mary Baker Eddy says, the central emblem of history. Maybe the challenge of the cross is to realize that it isn't the disposal of human events that establishes reality. It is the ever-present consciousness of the present divine order, the governing hand of Love, that establishes it. The people who put palms down for Jesus probably thought he was the saving king who would free them from the Roman yoke. Or at least that his power, as demonstrated by his healing works, would rise to the place of banishing all oppression. They didn't know that the greater work of the Messiah was to go into all the fractal paths of human thought and set everything right - to establish an order of peace that was universal because its underpinnings were internal - that it was the law of Love governing every cell of being, thus establishing pure individuals whose natural course is to engage lovingly with each other. Taking up the cross, then, would be the willingness to stand up for the goodness of being in every instance where it is challenged.
My part in the Good Friday service was to read Luke 23: 44-56, and then do a meditation on the phrase "Father, Into thy hands I commend my spirit." Here's what I shared:
“Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.”
Jesus commends his spirit to God. He entrusts God with all that he is. He does so in the acknowledgment that his spirit is good – worthy of commendation. There is no doubt about this in his expression. He simultaneously establishes the worthiness of himself and the trustworthiness of God.
Jesus lets go. He lets go of all the machinations of the world, all the politics, all the sordid soul-selling that led to the conspiracy to put him to death. He lets go of the need to teach anymore, to explain anymore, to make the people understand. He commends his spirit to God – he trusts God to take care of everything that he is – his life, his purpose, his mission.
Jesus cries to his Father. His relationship with God is unbroken. All that he is is established by this relationship – the son who can do nothing of himself, but who always does what the Father tells him. He is always motivated by Spirit, the creative power that gives the impulse of life to the whole universe, and the impulse of love to everything moving in Spirit’s consciousness. This allows him, in this most dark time, to release any sense of responsibility for what will happen, and let Spirit work to establish its unbroken harmony.
Jesus is our way-shower. We are his disciples, and his friends, if we do what he commands, and he commands that we follow him. We follow him not so much by suffering as by allowing God, Life and Love, to lift us out. We can do this with each smaller despair, each human heartbreak, each place where things seem hopeless. We can commend our spirit to God.
We can let go of the sense that we have to explain things, set things right, figure them out, bring all guilty parties to justice. We can let go even of the grief and the pain and the disappointment with events of the world. We can commend our spirit to God, with the confidence that, even if we don’t know exactly who we are, God knows. God made us, God loves us, and God will teach us what we are. God will prepare the table before us. In the end, the circumstances of our lives don’t get to have the last word about what we are.
Understanding Self-Immolation
On the very first page of Mary Baker Eddy’s book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, she writes, “Prayer, watching, and working, combined with self-immolation, are God’s gracious means for accomplishing whatever has been successfully done for the Christianization and health of mankind.” When I quoted this, a friend said, “did she really use that word?” His understanding of the term was that it meant: to set oneself on fire – which, indeed, is the meaning you will find if you look it up in Wikipedia. That meaning of the term is not what this post is about, and I think it’s pretty clear that it’s not how Mrs. Eddy meant it either.
The Latin word it comes from means to sprinkle with meal in preparation for sacrifice, and the word in earlier times meant to prepare oneself as an offering for sacrifice. The first definition of sacrifice is: an act of offering something precious to deity. So you could define self-immolation as preparing to offer yourself as something precious to deity. This makes the term more palatable to me, but my desire is not just to make it more palatable. My desire is, and has been, to understand how to accomplish the Christianization and health of mankind.
A word about Christianization – my working definition is that it means establishing the rule of Love – that is, achieving the state of civilization where people are always motivated by love in what they do. The law of Love is that, at whatever scale you look, everything there is being tended with utmost tenderness and perfect provision of exactly what it needs to thrive joyfully. This is seen on the level of the individual, the family, the civilization, the planet, the galaxies, etc, and also on the level of the cell, the atom, and all the things we don’t even know enough to name. To me Christianization has nothing to do with what people say they believe. It has everything to do with Spirit moving within.
So when I consider how I might have a part in bringing this law into human consciousness and experience, I need an operational understanding of self-immolation. Setting myself on fire, as a suicide, wouldn’t do much, but perhaps setting myself on fire with the fire that burns but doesn’t consume would be a good idea. Being on the burning edge of aliveness, being the flame that dances in its embrace of the air, demonstrating the spontaneity, heat and brightness of the fire, could be good.
Self sacrifice as it’s most often understood is a cause of much harm to people. Sacrificing my voice to some other authority entails the loss of my ability to stand up for my heart’s wisdom – for what I know is true and good. Sacrificing my choice to do what I love for some assumed necessity deprives me and the world of the gifts I am meant to give, and also prevents me from making sure that the things done in the world are life-affirming. Self-sacrifice is a concept too often used to allow uncaring forces to be at the helm of civilization, designing structures that kill life. The design of the universe is for each being to be heard, honored, and given its place to fulfill its whole potential, and not be sacrificed for anyone else’s purpose.
There is a part of my experience of growth in grace that involves constantly putting aside things that I thought defined me. Judgments, justifications, the sense of being the one who understands, have to go. Since growth entails continually gaining new understanding, the need to put aside the sense of being one who has the answers is also continual. There are other flavors of this as well in life experience, related to gaining of skill and even to being kind and feeling the glow of goodness. To use another analogy: every time a wave comes up on a sandy shore, it leaves a little line when it recedes. I need to remember: no matter how beautiful or how ungainly each line might be, I am not the line. I am the wave. It is the sense of self as a line left on the sand of time that I find useful to continually put off. As I become more conscious of myself as the wave, it serves to make me a precious offering to God. I offer not my death but my life, my life that is bright and fervent because it isn’t stifled by these senses of myself that are not me. So that is how, for now, I am using the concept of self-immolation.
The Latin word it comes from means to sprinkle with meal in preparation for sacrifice, and the word in earlier times meant to prepare oneself as an offering for sacrifice. The first definition of sacrifice is: an act of offering something precious to deity. So you could define self-immolation as preparing to offer yourself as something precious to deity. This makes the term more palatable to me, but my desire is not just to make it more palatable. My desire is, and has been, to understand how to accomplish the Christianization and health of mankind.
A word about Christianization – my working definition is that it means establishing the rule of Love – that is, achieving the state of civilization where people are always motivated by love in what they do. The law of Love is that, at whatever scale you look, everything there is being tended with utmost tenderness and perfect provision of exactly what it needs to thrive joyfully. This is seen on the level of the individual, the family, the civilization, the planet, the galaxies, etc, and also on the level of the cell, the atom, and all the things we don’t even know enough to name. To me Christianization has nothing to do with what people say they believe. It has everything to do with Spirit moving within.
So when I consider how I might have a part in bringing this law into human consciousness and experience, I need an operational understanding of self-immolation. Setting myself on fire, as a suicide, wouldn’t do much, but perhaps setting myself on fire with the fire that burns but doesn’t consume would be a good idea. Being on the burning edge of aliveness, being the flame that dances in its embrace of the air, demonstrating the spontaneity, heat and brightness of the fire, could be good.
Self sacrifice as it’s most often understood is a cause of much harm to people. Sacrificing my voice to some other authority entails the loss of my ability to stand up for my heart’s wisdom – for what I know is true and good. Sacrificing my choice to do what I love for some assumed necessity deprives me and the world of the gifts I am meant to give, and also prevents me from making sure that the things done in the world are life-affirming. Self-sacrifice is a concept too often used to allow uncaring forces to be at the helm of civilization, designing structures that kill life. The design of the universe is for each being to be heard, honored, and given its place to fulfill its whole potential, and not be sacrificed for anyone else’s purpose.
There is a part of my experience of growth in grace that involves constantly putting aside things that I thought defined me. Judgments, justifications, the sense of being the one who understands, have to go. Since growth entails continually gaining new understanding, the need to put aside the sense of being one who has the answers is also continual. There are other flavors of this as well in life experience, related to gaining of skill and even to being kind and feeling the glow of goodness. To use another analogy: every time a wave comes up on a sandy shore, it leaves a little line when it recedes. I need to remember: no matter how beautiful or how ungainly each line might be, I am not the line. I am the wave. It is the sense of self as a line left on the sand of time that I find useful to continually put off. As I become more conscious of myself as the wave, it serves to make me a precious offering to God. I offer not my death but my life, my life that is bright and fervent because it isn’t stifled by these senses of myself that are not me. So that is how, for now, I am using the concept of self-immolation.
Monday, April 2, 2007
To readers: request for dialog
Starting into my second month with this blog, I am reflecting on what a gift it is to me every time someone reads it. Reading it completes the circuitry of the desire for connection, healing, and oneness which rises up as my voice and demands that I give it expression. I can't know who's reading, but whenever I hear back that someone has, I feel a deep gratitude.
This is my invitation to you to let me know, and to enter into dialog about things that are important to you. I have given my e-mail in the contact info to the left of the text here. If you prefer more distance than that, or are comfortable with a public forum, please contact me by sending a comment to this post. I will respond.
Thanks very much for reading!
This is my invitation to you to let me know, and to enter into dialog about things that are important to you. I have given my e-mail in the contact info to the left of the text here. If you prefer more distance than that, or are comfortable with a public forum, please contact me by sending a comment to this post. I will respond.
Thanks very much for reading!
Sunday, April 1, 2007
“Love me”, “I love you”, and the Hungarian Phrase Book
A few years ago it occurred to me that, no matter what anyone was saying, they were really saying one of two things, or both. They were saying, “love me” and/or “I love you.” People complaining about the horrible (or annoying) state of their lives were saying “love me.” So was my daughter as she was pointedly saying how terribly I had misunderstood her, or my husband intimating that I wasn’t doing my share in the family equation. When my husband railed at me for how I was driving, he was saying, “I love you.” When he responded indignantly to my resisting the railing, he was saying both. So I began the experiment of translating people’s messages and receiving what they were really saying instead of their words.
A help in this was a favorite Monty Python sketch, the one about the Hungarian phrase book. In the first scene of the sketch, the news report says that the visiting Hungarians are a great nuisance because they are so obscene. It shows clips of them being carted away by police. Then in a subsequent clip, the news report says that the real culprit has been found – the publisher of a phony Hungarian phrase book that gives a false rendition of the English equivalents for basic things that a Hungarian visitor would need to be able to say. It shows the publisher being carted off by the police. In the third scene, a Hungarian visitor walks up to a counter and haltingly says, “May I fondle your buttocks?” The man behind a counter, after a quick consultation with a corrected manuscript, replies, with appropriate gestures, “Certainly. Just go out the door, take a left, and go down two blocks. You can’t miss it.” The visitor expresses his thanks and goes out – problem solved.
So I realized, it’s not a requirement that I react the way society expects me to, or the way my own emotions first tell me, to anything said to me. I don't need to be hurt, angry, indignant, annoyed. I also don’t need to be a language police for people – to tell them that the way they’re communicating is wrong and try to get them to do it differently. Instead, I can just consult the corrected manuscript and respond to what they’re really saying. And I remember that they’re either saying “love me,” “I love you,” or both.
The interesting thing about this exercise is that when I respond as if that is what they actually said, nobody finds it to be a non sequitur. They act as if I have actually responded appropriately to what they said.
If anyone else wants to try this experiment, I’d be very eager to hear the results.
A help in this was a favorite Monty Python sketch, the one about the Hungarian phrase book. In the first scene of the sketch, the news report says that the visiting Hungarians are a great nuisance because they are so obscene. It shows clips of them being carted away by police. Then in a subsequent clip, the news report says that the real culprit has been found – the publisher of a phony Hungarian phrase book that gives a false rendition of the English equivalents for basic things that a Hungarian visitor would need to be able to say. It shows the publisher being carted off by the police. In the third scene, a Hungarian visitor walks up to a counter and haltingly says, “May I fondle your buttocks?” The man behind a counter, after a quick consultation with a corrected manuscript, replies, with appropriate gestures, “Certainly. Just go out the door, take a left, and go down two blocks. You can’t miss it.” The visitor expresses his thanks and goes out – problem solved.
So I realized, it’s not a requirement that I react the way society expects me to, or the way my own emotions first tell me, to anything said to me. I don't need to be hurt, angry, indignant, annoyed. I also don’t need to be a language police for people – to tell them that the way they’re communicating is wrong and try to get them to do it differently. Instead, I can just consult the corrected manuscript and respond to what they’re really saying. And I remember that they’re either saying “love me,” “I love you,” or both.
The interesting thing about this exercise is that when I respond as if that is what they actually said, nobody finds it to be a non sequitur. They act as if I have actually responded appropriately to what they said.
If anyone else wants to try this experiment, I’d be very eager to hear the results.
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