Everything you have ever seen with your eyes is the self-emptying of God into multitudinous physical and visible forms. In other words, Infinity is forever limiting itself into finite expressions, and this could even be called the “suffering” of God. The Christ learned this self-emptying, or kenosis, 183 from his eternal life in the Trinity. It is not just Jesus who suffers, but the cross is the visible symbol of what is always going on inside of God!
There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of “common sense,” of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful “Beatrice.
As my father, St. Francis, put it, when the heart is pure, “Love responds to Love alone” and has little to do with duty, obligation, requirement, or heroic anything. It is easy to surrender when you know that nothing but Love and Mercy is on the other side.
St. Augustine admits in his Confessions: “Late have I loved you, Beauty so very ancient and so ever new. Late have I loved you! You were within, but I was without.
Don’t start with the One and try to make it into Three, but start with the Three and see that this is the deepest nature of the One. This starting point, along with the contemplative mind to understand it, was much more emphasized and developed in the Eastern church, which is frankly why it still sounds foreign to most of the Western churches.
In fact, I would say what makes so much religion so innocuous, ineffective, and even unexciting is that there has seldom been a concrete “decision to turn our lives over to the care of God,” even in many people who go to church, temple, or mosque. I have been in religious circles all my life and usually find willfulness run rampant in monasteries, convents, chancery offices, and among priests and prelates, ordinary laity, and at church meetings.
When you are concerned with either attacking or defending, manipulating or resisting... you cannot be contemplative. When you are preoccupied with enemies, you are always dualistic.
All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring.
Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a stance. It’s a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, and even of enjoying the Presence. The full contemplative is not just aware of the Presence, but trusts, allows, and delights in it.
Our small, scarcity-based worldview is the real aberration here, and I believe it has largely contributed to the rise of atheism and the “practical atheism” that is the actual operative religion of most Western countries today. The God we’ve been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to trust or to love back.
It is the struggle with darkness and grief that educates the male soul.
God has no grandchildren. God only has children,” as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself. If not, we just react to the previous generation, and often overreact. Or we conform, and often overconform. Neither is a positive or creative way to move forward.
Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody.
Before Jesus, it was all about earning and meriting and performing, and Paul knew that would eat us all alive – as it has.
Human strength is defined in asserting boundaries. God, it seems, is in the business of dissolving boundaries. So we enter into paradox – what’s Three is one and what’s One is three. We just can’t resolve that, and so we confuse unity with uniformity.
It’s not the idea that we hear, as much as the positive or negative energy behind it.
As I said, this Spirit has two jobs. First, she creates diversity, as exemplified in the metaphor of wind – just breathing out ever-new life in endlessly diverse forms. But then the Spirit has another job: that of the Great Connector – of all those very diverse things! All this pluriform life, the Spirit keeps in harmony and “mutual deference”267 – “so there shall be one Christ, loving Himself,” as Augustine daringly put it.268.
In a culture like ours, still preoccupied with security issues, enormously high military budgets are never seriously questioned by Congress or by the people, while appropriations reflecting later stages in the hierarchy of needs, like those for education, health care for the poor, and the arts, are quickly cut, if even considered. The message is clear that we are largely an adolescent culture.
God seems to have chosen to manifest the invisible in what we call the “visible,” so that all things visible are the revelation of God’s endlessly diffusive spiritual energy. Once a person recognizes that, it is hard to ever be lonely in this world again.
As I’m coming to realize more and more, God holds everything together in a mysterious quantum entanglement. With each breath we participate in the life-death-life pattern that always ends in resurrection. My hope is that each of us will choose to participate consciously, aware of this privilege and delight in being co-creators with God. Just pray that I can do whatever God wants me to do.