cairns

Am still contemplating the things I have been taught to say so lightly; God lives in us, Heaven is where God is, We are all one body, Heaven is a lost coin, a hidden pearl, a found sheep…  By my definitions, God in us makes us heavens.  Tolstoy wrote about it with great eloquence when he declared The Kingdom is Within!  Like a favorite author who spoke of the day it occurred to him that his Christian college should be covered with scorch marks if people were as close to God as they claimed, I am looking for signs.  But, scorch marks sound more like evidence of hell to me.  Seems like we should be surrounded by marks of grace and love.  Then in contemplation I find the dark marks on a narrow path into an indescribable light and own them all.

If we really encounter the Universal in our own core, then all turning away — from anybody or any part of creation — must be a denial of ourselves.  If everything that is – exists from, in, through, and for God; then who or what is excluded from that central part of me where I find God?  And if everything exists from, in, through, and for God then doesn’t that same core already exist in all of God’s creatures?  Maybe we are most hellish when we try to act as if we can deny our own core.  We claim in misery not to know it rests there both in our own center and in the “other.”  How wonderfully the world sings when we recognize that common core in love and gratitude!

Again this week contacted  friends far away because they were on our minds and found that we were already on theirs as well.  Time and space shrink in significance in the world of the common Spirit.  How can I despise anyone or anything having become aware that its source, core, and destiny is the same as mine; knowing that the other also exists deep within me as I do in the other?  Analogies fail — human love, universes in atoms while made of atoms, light within light, “the inside of the stable is larger,” words hint, point, struggle to speak and fall short.  I do not have to know what happens someday in someplace.  I know unity of being all time and all places sitting still today in this place.

But, it is not some silly bliss.  The very real tears of a child who does not understand are my own tears.  The confusion of a special needs friend riding around on a hot bus because nobody is there at the bus stop, is my own confusion.  The isolation of the child who asks why do they keep saying I look Chinese is my isolation as well.  The world through divine eyes is at every moment over the capacity of both human laughter and tears.  Emotions are too small to contain or express it.  But felt, owned, and shared they become part of the wholeness today offers.

Heaven doesn’t look like I thought it would at this point in my life.  (The flannel pictures showed more hair!)  But, I am learning to recognize you, and me.  We see each other through dark glasses on the surface.  But in the brilliant inner light we encounter the fullness of we, divinity covered in mud, creatures containing creator, mutual expressions of transforming love in many disguises but all part of One.

There just are not words, the medium of speech leaves me sitting at a crumbling tower of long ago.  But, if you see me looking strangely follow my gaze along the beam to the beauty of your heaven filled self.

peace

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Man, I am going to have to get my hands on this book too!  One great book leads to more…Here is a bit I pulled from the web.

Stage five, Conjunctive faith moves one from stage four’s rationalism to the acknowledgement of paradox and transcendence. It is in this stage that, in Washburnian terminology, one chooses regression in the service of transcendence. In this stage a person grasps the reality behind the symbols of his or her inherited systems, and is also drawn to and acknowledging of the symbols of other’s systems. This stage makes room for mystery and the unconscious, and is fascinated by it while at the same time apprehensive of its power. It sees the power behind the metaphors while simultaneously acknowledging their relativity. In stage five, the world, demythologized in stage four, is re-sacrilized, literally brimming with vision. It is also imbued with a new sense of justice that goes beyond justice defined by one’s own culture and people. Because one has begun to see “the bigger picture” the walls culture and tradition have built between ourselves and others begins to erode. It is not easy to live on the cusp of paradox, and due to its radical drive towards inclusivity, the mind struggles to assimilate and integrate faster than it can work through its cultural and psychological baggage. It is an overwhelming, ecstatic stage in which one is radically opened to possibility and wonder.

Stage six, the final stage, Fowler calls Universalizing faith. While in the previous stage, one glimpses a unitive view of reality, but feels torn between possibility and loyalty, and may even neglect to act on its new understanding out of a regard for self-preservation. In stage six, any such apprehensions dissolve and one becomes an activist for the unitive vision. Fowler describes it best, when he writes:

Persons described by stage six typically exhibit qualities that shake our usual criteria of normalcy. Their heedlessness to self-preservation and the vividness of their taste and feel for transcendent moral and religious actuality give their actions and words an extraordinary and often unpredictable quality. In their devotion to universalizing compassion they may offend our parochial perceptions of justice. In their penetration through the obsession with survival, security, and significance they threaten our measured standards of righteousness and goodness and prudence. Their enlarged visions of universal community disclose the partialness of our tribes and pseudo-species. And their leadership initiatives, often involving strategies of nonviolent suffering and ultimate respect for being, constitute affronts to our usual notions of relevance.” (Fowler, 200)

http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/2219.htm

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Watched Hallmark Hall of Fame movie last night about a woman rescuing children from death at the hands of the Nazi’s.  After everything I have read, and all the places I have been privileged to go, I still do not understand two things about our relationship to “others.”

I will never understand, maybe in the head — but never deep within my soul, how one comes to see another as so different from oneself that they can be considered unworthy of life and grace.  I can imagine myself reaching that level in response to adult perpetrators of atrocities, that is why I choose to be a pacifist.  I know I could reach the point of being willing to kill.  But, I cannot imagine how one reaches the point of deciding that is the correct response toward the worst of us, let alone the least of us.

The other thing I cannot understand, as I try to help four daughters finish their journeys into adulthood, is how we ever claim to “know” the mind of another at all.  We all both share and hide even in our closest relationships.  We think we know what we observe, what we hear the other say, even what our own role in the relationship is.  But, the unknowns always exceed the knowns.  If we cannot be sure of the inner nature of those we love, how can we become sure we are correct about those we do not?

It is beyond me.

peace

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They were talking about living out the compassion of Christ — why does it always have to be on TV? But, at least they were calling people to living out their faith.

Went to the Mission Leadership Team meeting and heard very good things about what is happening now and on the near horizon. Such wonderful followers of Jesus in that group. They are a blessing to be with.

Then home to check on daughter whose fever is now 102+ and missing more school. And was IM-ing with my wife at work about my new car toy, a Garmin Nuvi.

I smarted off about how nice it would be if the Bible and Spirit worked more like that — look up verse and passage such and such, apply now, share there, etc. And my dear wife said, “I think it’s more like a scavenger hunt!”

My most uplifting thought today is that is what Jesus said over and over. The kingdom is like a hidden pearl, a lost coin, a lost sheep…Happy hunting this week and may the God that Vincent Donovan discovered while sharing with the Massai visit you. The God who like a lion in the end captures you when you thought you were searching for Him.

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I almost went back today.  The Mission Leadership Team was meeting and they are all my friends.  But, when the time came, I could not make myself go.

I have seen deeply into the compartmentalized world of the mega-church.  Missions is not youth work, is not prayer team, is not counseling, is not preaching, is not…you must imagine arrows going both directions between all these things.  Everything is fragmented into some-body’s responsibility and some-body’s territory.  But, regardless of why or how, it is fragmented.  And how you handle personnel issues is fragmented from how you treat people as children of God, what you sell to the people in the seats is separated from the unquestionable behavior of ‘the leadership’, belief is fragmented from action, action and belief are fragmented from being.

Instead I am reading Rollins who reminds me that I am more of a mystic than I can express in that place.  I have been, in the terms of the American Natives, touched.  My deepest beliefs are not propositional statements, but connections to a formless One.  I live my life in anticipation of gazing into the eyes of One is spirit not body.  My deepest understandings of the world around me come when those eyes look out through mine and my heart is both crushed and freed as I behold suffering and love wrapped in frail human packages who need no sermon so much as that touch from beyond the world of touch.

I think that I will not be ever again at home in a church, especially a mega-church.  We reduce everything to definitions, dogmas, departments, designated roles, descriptions, deceits, devotions, and damnations.  I belong to that other ‘church,’ that collection of sinners and saints, heroes and reprobates, believers and scoffers who have been blown away by the existence of something beyond the realm of existence.  I will try again to find a flesh and blood community to inhabit, support and damage by my presence, abide together in.  For now, I think I shall remain in a season of dwelling with that which cannot be seen, and which transforms the world not by strategies but by being, without physical form, but being, loving, and transforming just the same.

peace

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was listening to a devotion on Luke 5 today and verse 4 jumped out at me. If you look it up, the words above have a comma after speaking and make normal sense in the context of the story. They still brought me up short and I am hoping to get to do my own devotion based on them as the group is interpreting the entire text as a call to “go deep.”

The implied oxymoron of the six words is not that unusual for us. We often say at least one more thing after we have really finished speaking!

But this is Jesus, and the words he says after speaking change the lives of this group of fisherman forever. Having finished teaching, he tells them what to do. It takes me to a contemplation of prayer.

After time we learn to stay in prayer beyond our own talking whether praise, request, or thanksgiving and then listen for what God has for us. But, I wonder how often we still jump up and run as soon as we think He speaks when we ought to be waiting for what He says after He speaks. Perhaps He has a personal word of direction for us beyond the teaching if we would linger.

But, we are busy. That is the usual excuse. I suspect it is something more. He might tell us to do something crazy like fish in the daytime where nothing was swimming at night. And obedience might change what we think we know and require us to act in new ways. He isn’t safe you know. Nobody who knows Him intimately ever said He was safe.

If we staid in holy silence beyond what we believe He is teaching, what might He call us to?

Would we finally understand the psalmist’s proclamation that “deep calls to deep” if we staid past the surface time of busy-ness, mind and words?

Would He call us anew to live out what He clearly already said — to function as the unified Church undivided by our countless petty doctrines and favorite positions, to serve the orphan and widow, to cling to nothing and follow Him?

Would He again lower Peter’s sheet and call us to new behavior that contradicts many things we have believed to be true — to love those we now condemn as he loves them already, to participate in His continuous miracle of creation instead of “ruling” it and using it up, to walk humbly in the world instead of being so sure of anything but Him?

I wonder what we would hear if we staid for what He says after He finishes speaking.

peace

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The following selection is from James Finley’s book, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere.  I keep losing the citation and going back to the shelf to rediscover it again and again when my soul needs its truth.  Enjoy.

            “Prayer understood as the distilled awareness of our entire life before God, is a journey forward, a response to a call from the Father to become perfectly like his Son through the power of the Holy Spirit.  But this journey forward can also be seen as a kind of journey backward, in which we seek to gain access to the relationship Adam had with God.

            In prayer, we journey forward to our origin.  We close our eyes in prayer and open them in the pristine moment of creation.  We open our eyes to find God, his hands still smeared with clay, hovering over us, breathing into us his own divine life, smiling to see in us a reflection of himself.  We go to our place of prayer confident that in prayer we transcend both place and time.

            In prayer, distinctions like outside and inside, past and future, no longer apply.  In prayer, we sit before the gates of Eden and the self of the Father created us to be appears, freed from layer upon layer of falsity and distortion in which we had become entangled and lost.  In prayer, we experience this going back to our origin as a going into the center of our self, where God holds both our origin and end in one eternal moment.”

peace

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What if John 3:16 means exactly what it says — that would out literal my fundamentalist literalistic background!  What if He loves and saves the “world?”  What if its not just the proper doctrine world, or the dunked world, or the 4-laws world, the informed world, the western world, the repentant world, or any qualified and limited world?  What if it means what it says?

I know all the verses and passages we use to claim that it is exclusive to whoever we choose to define as worthy of the club.  I know them well.  But, I am currently contemplating the possibilities of having missed something significant.  When I was a child we spoke of how the Jews of Jesus day focused on only the kingly prophecies and this missed the suffering Messiah.  What if we are the ones doing that?  What if we are focusing so much on passages calling men directly into the kingdom life, that we are missing whole passages on God’s plan to bring the whole world into worship of Him — and salvation?

[Saturday morning: for example this morning i have been following the ideas of God's redemption and jubilee through the Bible.  These threads speak more of God's redemption based on God's character not ours -- and it includes the land!  Sunday morning: does the Mathew 20 account of the Vineyard owner paying the late recruits the same wages out of his own generosity belong here?]

We have no problem saying by one man sin and death entered the world, and most of those I have spent my life among have no problem saying it applies to all with no action on our part required.  We are simply damned as part of Adam’s fallen offspring — evil by nature.  Even within that view, why should God’s salvation be less inclusive than His judgement?

What if God meant it when he reviewed His handiwork and said, “It is good,” and still does?  What if the whole judgement/punishment/payment model is in fact our chosen not His given view (or at least not only view)?  What if the incarnation/crucifixion/resurrection was indeed a rescue mission of God’s good work – all of it?  Does a lifeguard stop to see if the swimmer wants to live or loves the lifeguard?

What if nature is also included?  We have no problem including it in the fall.  All the evidence of life’s hardships seems to confirm it.  Why would it not be included in the rescue by a God who notes the status of every sparrow?

What if….

Would we object to God giving grace beyond our theologies?  Would we be offended?  Would we stop sharing the news of this rescue if we learned it was not fire insurance?  Would we love God less for loving all of His handiwork?  What if God does indeed run to embrace the starving reprobate?

I haven’t really changed views — at least not completely. I would be dishonest to claim otherwise.  But, I am constantly confronted by a God who is bigger and wilder than anything I imagine.  And I am visiting with Him in the possibilities beyond my childhood views.

And, I have to say, I like what I am finding.  I would not cease to share this message that we have been rescued.  I would want others to experience the joy of the kingdom that has already come upon us.  I would ask others to consider how our attitudes toward this planet match those of the God who saves.  Would we so easily be able to claim we walk in His footsteps?

I do not need the answer.  I only need the God who is bigger than all I imagine, the God who loves beyond my capacity, who saves men without merit throughout the Bible narrative, who dances with me in the mystery.  I hope the universalists are right.  See you all at the party!

peace

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I am still exploring something of this that is beyond my grasp.  How do I go out into the dark to seek others if the fire travels with me?  Does the light shine out where I go?  Is that determined more by the power of the light or my degree of transparency?  How does my small frail self hold the Light of All Lights?

Sunday the song “Come to my heart Lord Jesus, there is room in my heart for Thee.”  Really?  If I go beyond sentimental meanings of “Y’all come now Jesus,”  room?  seriously enough room in my small heart for the Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer, Restorer and Lord?

This is a great mystery I am exploring, not trying to solve.  I’m not looking for simple verses or easy answers.  I am just blown away by the immensity of what we claim so casually!  And yet, in some ways, it is the same mystery I was describing earlier in my little heresy post.  In the moments when I am unable to perceive light, when the darkness of this world and age loom largest, when the educated of the world including theologians proclaim that the God I know is dead, I find Him right there in me!

I do not know how that can be.  I do not know how His own earthly body could contain Him. 

But, I know it is true.  He said it.  I have met Him there on the border of hell speaking out from within me.  I have found Him on the mountain top bringing me home to work again. 

What I am musing about here are the questions which draw me to understand how much bigger, other, beyond — and at the same time close, intimate, and available He is.  What a great wonder that all present light is darkness compared to the full understanding of Him, and my darkest days are pure light compared to life without Him.  I am exploring mysteries in great gratitude.

peace

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