Christ – Intelligent Christian Spirituality

Transformative Loss: Finding Strength in Lent

Lent is a time of loss. The 40 days before Easter are meant to commemorate the 40 years the ancient Israelites were lost in the desert before coming to the Promised Land. Lent is also a time when Christians lose things, give them up, as a way of commemorating Christ’s great loss, the sacrifice of his life on a cross.

Lent is a time of repentance, of turning around, of turning away from things that may be addictive habits the rest of the year. Some give up chocolate, dessert, or that lovely glass of wine after work. Many go deeper and see Lent as a time to lose unholy attitudes: jealousy, self-pity, unforgiveness, adulterous thoughts, the internal sins that no one knows about except us.

Some choose loss during Lent, and some have loss thrust upon them. Due to the financial meltdown, people are losing their jobs, homes, businesses, retirement plans, and peace of mind.

Those who work in palliative care, hospice, and hospital emergency departments receive training in how a person’s “assumptive world,” all the assumptions they have about the way life will be, can implode in an instant: their son or daughter is killed in a car accident, their spouse learns they have cancer, has a stroke, or dies. The normal response is to feel like the ground under your feet has suddenly disappeared, you are falling, and your whole life is falling apart.

The scriptures contain one of the most spectacular stories of loss ever recorded, a story that makes most of our losses seem small by comparison. Job was a man of God who had it all: great wealth, a wonderful family, and an outstanding reputation. Then he had a total meltdown: he lost all his money, his family, and even his health. His friends accused him of bringing all this on himself through some hidden sin, although he couldn’t think of anything he had done to deserve this. Even his wife urged him to “curse God and die.” However, despite all the absurdity, he continued to trust God.

A time of loss can be a time of personal transformation. When people lose precious things, they start to realize that, despite their former assumptions, life is very vulnerable, dreams are fleeting at best, and one’s fortunes can suddenly reverse. The natural response is to ask, “What is really important in life?”

In the face of all this loss, people search for a solid foundation for their life, something eternal and unchanging. People start to realize that the only lasting thing is God. Quite simply, it’s God or nothing.

It’s not surprising that church attendance goes up during individual or social meltdowns. Next to God, the church is one of the few constants in our civilization. It has been there through the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the advent of modern science, communism, two planetary wars, and the Great Depression. The church has witnessed many severe storms come and go.

People who build their lives on the solid foundation of God know that, with God’s help, they can withstand any storm, crisis, or meltdown, just as the church has. They also know that God can bring a greater good out of any loss.

Throughout the scriptures, God brings new life out of evil, no matter how great. Job trusted God and was vindicated in the end: everything and more was restored to him. As our human exemplar, Jesus trusted God and was resurrected so that all of us could reach the Promised Land.

No matter how bad it gets, as long as we trust God, all is well, and as Julian of Norwich said, “All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.”

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com

The Historical Reality of Jesus: Myths vs. Truth

Within Christianity in the past thirty years, there have been persistent attempts to recast the basic tenets of Christianity itself. One of the most remarkable attempts came from Tom Harpur, who noted in The Pagan Christ that other cultures had myths about the dying and rising god, and therefore, the early church just made up a myth about the dying and rising Jesus.

Myths in many cultures have been powerful carriers of cosmic truths, and the early church knew this. However, according to Harpur, over the course of its first three hundred years, the church gradually came to claim that the myth they had made up was a historical reality called Jesus Christ.

My sense is that Harpur is either not being true to himself or has somehow forgotten his theological studies as an Anglican priest. Every student of Christian theology is taught that the distinctiveness of the Jewish God was that this God acted in history. One of the most dramatic examples of this was when God liberated the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. God acted throughout Jewish history from the time of Abraham to the kings and prophets.

This experience of God acting in history simply continued in the most dramatic way of all when God became human in Jesus Christ. God acting in history was not a new idea that the early church made up. The church did not try to change a myth into a reality. Rather, it proclaimed that all the myths of other cultures suddenly became a reality when Christ was born. This was Paul’s basic approach when he told the Greeks and Romans that Jesus was their Unknown God.

Harpur is right that God has always been incarnate in all of God’s creation, and therefore, there are many paths to God, but the traditional belief of the church has been that God was incarnate in a special way in Christ and therefore, Christ is a specialpath to God. This idea that the Infinite Ruler of the Universe can be in a specific location in a special way is, again, not a new Christian idea. Jews believed that God was present in a special way in the sanctuary of the temple. Catholics, Anglicans, and Lutherans have taken the special incarnation of God a step further in their belief that the cosmic Christ is incarnate in a very special way in the communion host.

It makes sense that God would not just tell us how to live, as God did in the Ten Commandments, but God would also showus how to live by becoming human. In Christ, God gave us a three year audio-visual demonstration of what a true human being is and also what God is really like.

There were many witnesses to the specialness of Jesus before, during, and after his life. First, there is the ancient scriptural record. Before the historical Jesus appeared, there were dozens of prophecies recorded in the Jewish scriptures of what the Messiah would be like: royal, suffering, and divine. Jesus fulfilled all these prophecies, particularly the ones by the prophet Isaiah, who said that a child will be born who will be called “Mighty God” and “Everlasting Father” and will have a kingdom without end (Isaiah 9: 6-8). This suffering servant will be “pierced for our sins”, but “by his wounds, we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5)

Then there is the vision of the prophet Daniel of a man who was led into the presence of God. God gave this man everlasting authority, sovereign power, and glory, and the people of every nation worshiped him (Daniel 7:13-14). There are many other Jewish prophecies like this.

During Christ’s life, he gave great and sublime teachings such as the Sermon on the Mount, in which he first focused on the nature of true happiness in the Beatitudes. The rest of Christ’s teachings also extended and completed the spirit of the Law and the Prophets.

Another witness is the astounding miracles: Jesus calming the raging sea, multiplying food for the hungry, healing all manner of illnesses, driving out evil spirits, and raising a man to life who had been dead for four days!

Even if we overlook the miracles, there is the witness of the way Christ lived. His courage, integrity, wisdom, and compassion were so complete they must have had a supernatural source.

There is the witness of the appearances of Christ after his resurrection to hundreds of disciples, and there is the New Testament record of miracles performed in the name of Jesus by these disciples.

There is also the witness of people dying for their faith in Christ, the record of all the martyrs in the early church. No one would lay down their life for some mythical human being. Then there is the record of the ongoing growth of the church through the centuries and of so many present-day martyrs.

Put all this together, and one is almost forced to conclude that in Jesus, something extremely special was going on. In fact, it all points to one reality: that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to God. In the birth of Christ, God gave us the greatest gift of all: God in the form of a human being.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion www.brucetallman.com

Archetypes underlie all religions

Given all the religion-based conflict in the world, perhaps it would help if we tried to emphasize the similarities between religions rather than the differences tha t drive us apart and cause bloodshed. Archetypes provide a valuable common ground since they underlie all faiths.

Carl Jung, one of the great psychologists of the twentieth century, noticed that certain patterns kept coming up, not only in his patients’ dreams, but also in literature, mythology, history, religion, and daily life in all cultures and all ages.

From this he surmised that all humans must share in a level of the psyche even deeper than the subconscious mind that his mentor, Sigmund Freud, discovered. Jung called this deeper level the collective unconscious, and the contents of this part of the psyche or soul he called archetypes.

Archetypes are spiritual energy centers and part of the imago Dei, the image of God that God created in the soul, to guide us to fulfilling lives. Jung and others claim that these primordial images are like instincts in that they subconsciously control everything we think, feel, and do.

Four key archetypes that form the basic structure of the human soul in men and women everywhere are the sovereign, warrior, seer, and lover. Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, Robert Moore, Carol Pearson, Caroline Myss, Robert Bly, and others have written extensively about these four heroic archetypes.

The sovereign is the benevolent leader or person in charge, the warrior is the one who fights for goodness and justice, the seer is the wise man or woman, and the lover is the one who is passionate for others whether it is a partner, friend, the poor, or the earth.

As an example of how the sovereign appears everywhere and in every age, consider that throughout history there have been kings, queens, maharajahs, sultans, tsars, emperors, presidents, and prime ministers in various countries, as well as chiefs in native American, Canadian, Brazilian, Australian, and African tribes. The sovereign is also manifest in daily life in the chief executive officer or manager at work, or the father or mother at home.

There are also anti-heroic or “shadow” archetypes which involve complete possession or complete dispossession by the sovereign, warrior, seer, or lover. For example, if a person is completely possessed by the sovereign archetype, he or she becomes a tyrant. Complete dispossession means the person becomes an abdicator. The other anti-heroic archetypes are the sadist and masochist (warrior shadows), manipulator and fool (seer shadows), and the addict and frigid (lover shadows).

These negative archetypes, working subconsciously, can cause great misery in our lives. In fact, the whole post-911 world can be explained in terms of archetypes in the form of tyrants (George W. and Saddam) and sadists (Osama and other terrorists).

Negative archetypes can also affect church leadership in the form of bishops and priests who are tyrants ruling with an iron fist, abdicators who don’t teach justice, sadists who condemn everyone’s spirituality and morality but their own, masochists who don’t take care of themselves, manipulators who make the laity fearful, fools who subtly block the ministry of any talented lay person, addicts who abuse children for their own sexual pleasure, and frigids who are burned out, emotionally dead, and cynical.

People in archetypal roles have great power because they activate the numinous archetypal energies of our souls. This explains the aura that surrounds seers such as the medical doctor, medicine man or woman, shaman, guru, imam, rabbi, priest, or minister. This also explains why the pope and dalai lama draw huge crowds wherever they go. They have double the fascinating numinous power since they are in both the sovereign and seer role.

The Bible is eternally appealing to the human soul because it is an archetypal book, full of heroic and anti-heroic sovereigns, warriors, seers and lovers. Think, for example, in the Jewish scriptures/Old Testament of King David, Queen Esther, King Saul, Queen Jezebel, Goliath, Samson, Delilah, Samuel, Solomon, Isaiah, Ruth, and the lovers in The Song of Songs.

The New Testament likewise is full of heroes and anti-heroes. There is Peter (the spiritual abdicator and later, spiritual sovereign), Paul (the spiritual warrior if ever there was one), King Herod, Queen Herodias, Pilate (the political abdicator), centurions and zealots, magi (seers), good and bad priests, John the Baptist, Judas (the manipulator), contemplatives (lovers of God) like Stephen and John the beloved disciple, and so on.

Churches use archetypal language all the time, whether they know it or not, when they refer to Christ as priest, prophet, king, and supreme lover. Certainly he was in warrior mode when he cleared the moneychangers out of the temple, and there is a graphic, symbolic description in the book of Revelation (19:11-21) of Christ leading the armies of heaven against the forces of evil. To Christians, Jesus had the four foundational archetypes in perfection.

Since these archetypes are hardwired into the human psyche, they appear in other religions as well. No Muslim would dispute the fact that Mohammed is the sovereign leader of Islam, that he was a physical and spiritual warrior in the wars against the polytheists, and a great seer in receiving the Quran from the archangel Gabriel.

Hindus could point to Krishna as a lover when he danced with the gopi cowgirls, Arjuna as a warrior, and great seers like Sri Aurobindo, Vivekananda and others. All Buddhist monks and nuns would come under the seer archetype, and boddhisattvas would be examples of agape lovers, sacrificing their own entrance into nirvana until all sentient beings are enlightened.

Anyone interested in ministry or leadership in any religion, or in spirituality in general, would do well to familiarize themselves with the heroic and anti-heroic archetypes which have the power to fulfill or destroy any individual, religious tradition, or even whole societies.

Bruce Tallman is author of Archetypes for Spiritual Direction: Discovering the Heroes Within (Paulist Press 2005). See http://www.brucetallman.com.

Understanding God: Beyond Fundamentalism

Dear Friends,

On October 12 the London Free Press published my article below under the title “Broad interpretations of God are important”

It is 670 words, so when you have 2 minutes, why not give it a quick read?

Blessings and peace,

Bruce Tallman

Spiritual Director

www.brucetallman.com

Fundamentalists need a broader interpretation of God and scripture

It is important for contemporary Christians to have a broad interpretation of God, Jesus, scripture, and theology since fundamentalism can be a dangerous force in our world, denying science, evolution, vaccines, and climate change.

In this regard, it is important to understand that God is both apophatic and cataphatic. Apophatic means God is beyond human understanding, while cataphatic refers to the concrete, understandable dimension of God. The primary example is God becoming human in Jesus, so we would have some way of understanding the apophatic God.

Christians need to hold onto both these dimensions. If you lose the apophatic dimension, you can become arrogant in your certainty about God and believe you must force your narrow understanding on others. But if you lose the cataphatic dimension, God becomes completely unknowable, and you may as well stop talking about God.

A third important dimension of God is the Holy Spirit, who is incarnate in every person as love, wisdom, joy, peace, and humility. Wherever you find those spiritual qualities, whether in Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, humanists, or atheists, the divine Spirit is present, leading them to a closer relationship with God. They don’t need you to convert them, God is already doing it..

People who believe in the supremacy of scripture usually mean the supremacy of their own interpretation of scripture. So, to avoid fundamentalism, it is important to realize that scripture is interpreted in many ways.

The Bible did not fall out of the sky. It came to us through a church, and there is no historical break between present-day Catholicism and the early church. Christ gave Peter and the rest of the apostles the authority to properly interpret scripture when he said, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).

Catholic bishops, the apostles’ successors, then organized early church councils that decided which books should go in the Bible and which should be excluded. The New Testament is a Catholic document.

However, Catholicism recognizes the supremacy of everyone’s conscience. You should study church teaching and Catholic interpretations of scripture before making moral decisions. However, if you cannot agree in good conscience with these sources, you are free to follow your own conscience. You are ultimately accountable to God, not to the Catholic church.

Also, many fundamentalists subscribe to a narrow fall/redemption theology which many theologians now disagree with as it ignores the first and second chapters of the Bible, where God created humans and everything as “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Instead, this theology focuses exclusively on the third chapter, the fall of humans into evil, and the redemptive work of Jesus on the cross, which conquers our fallenness.

In addition to scriptural narrowness, fall/redemption theology gives us a horrific picture of God – a God who is wrathful, violent, and demands blood and death, or his anger won’t be satisfied, a god who consigns people to eternal torture if they don’t believe in this narrow theology. A different interpretation is that we create our own hell by our bad decisions.

Fall/redemption theology also lets Christians off the hook—they don’t have to change their lives to be saved. All they must do is believe in Jesus’s redemptive sacrifice on the cross. This diminishes Jesus’s life and teachings, which are often ignored, and which accounts for the hypocrisy and failure of many Christians to follow Jesus genuinely.

A poster in my home office says, “Why and from what does Jesus save us? To form a more perfect world, Jesus saves us, by example, from living only for ourselves.” This requires interaction between God and humans; we cannot do it alone.

However, as scripture says, “faith without works is dead” (James 2:17-26). God gives us faith, but we must do the work. We are saved by following Jesus’ example of loving God and others. Jesus says, “Do this, and you will inherit eternal life” (Luke 10: 25-28).

Bruce Tallman is a London an educator of adults on religion. http://www.brucetallman.com

Repentance and Glory: Transformative Christian Values

Making room for not knowing

is more important than certainty –

we think something is going to bring us pleasure

or misery/be a disaster or a great adventure

but we really don’t know

one thing we do know for certain:

inferior goods such as silver and gold/

temporal honors and power

have their temporary delights

but they are nothing compared to God

who made them all –

true delight and joy rests in God

“Ultimate Reality is at hand –

change your mind and believe such good news!”

– Richard Rohr’s translation of

“The kingdom of God is at hand

repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15)

to repent is to change your mind –

to be baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection

means that you have died to the values

of the Roman or American Empire

and been born into Christian values

of peace/charity/justice/nonviolence

which sometimes involves suffering like Christ

who said to Francis of Assisi

“I have given you the stigmata

the five wounds in my feet/hands/side

the emblems of my Passion

so that you may be my Standard-Bearer”

but Francis tried to hide these wounds

which in truth were his glory

but then again, God hides God’s glory:

“God’s glory is to be in all God’s creatures

giving them their being/breath/everything

living in their midst as unknown

for if we could see how unlike our glory

is to God’s glory

we would die for love of God.”

– Thomas Merton

The Messy God in All Things

Raimon Pannikar and Paul Tillich support Teilhard’s view

that a new perspective of God is rising out of the old one –

a God more comfortable with the messiness of evolution

than with the order and structure of Greek metaphysics

the direction of evolution is now seen as

towards the maximization of goodness

and thus towards the incarnation of God –

if Christ is the Divine Word as Creator

and if Christ is the Word Incarnate as Jesus

Christ Jesus is also the Redeemer –

what is created in Love is redeemed in Love

through prayer Love is received

and through miracles Love is expressed

prayer is the medium for miracles

our night dreams show us

we contain in our unconscious

the miracle of secret Aladdin caves

a mythological world of jewels and ‘jinn’ –

spirits within that invite us into

the desire and dread of the human adventure –

to have our secure inner world dismantled/

deconstructed but also reconstructed

into a broader/more compassionate/

more fully human space

in general, it is better to approach God

through the Holy Spirit, as a living reality

than through theology as an abstract concept

self-abandonment to Divine Providence

in the present moment

begets faith

which helps us to see

God hides God’s Self

so we develop a pure faith

that can see God in everything –

in all life

and all evolution.

Unveiling Mysticism: The Journey to Unitive Life and the Pursuit of Truth

Salvation does not equal ‘piety’ or ‘ethical propriety’

salvation has to do with God’s love

for our deepest metaphysical nature –

our true self/the human person

which is beyond description/comprehension –

salvation is God’s ineffable love

and our ineffable love of God

and responsibility for our future

has now passed from God to us

“Our life and death are in our own hands

salvation is the realization and integration of this”

– Don Cupitt

“All history is a struggle against good and evil”

– Gaudium Et Spes (The Pastoral Constitution

on the Church in the Modern World, Vatican II)

Christ thus exhorts us to be holy

as God is holy

and God loves everyone

so to be holy is to love everyone

as God loves everyone – good or evil –

God allows sun and rain to fall on the just and unjust

Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism has two parts:

1. The Mystic Fact: how mysticism relates

to Henri Bergson’s Elan Vital

and to modern psychology

2. The Mystic Way: the awakening/purification/training

of the self in the ascent to the blessedness

of the Unitive Life

“A God-fearing person must follow the Truth

regardless of the consequences

even though it endangers their life –

they must trust that a good deed

will have a good result –

they know it is better to die in the way of God

than to live in the way of Satan.”

– Gandhi

EASTER: HUMAN VS DIVINE PERFECTION

Carl Jung believed each of us

originally had a total and powerful sense

of the Self – the total psyche

but then trauma caused the Ego to emerge

which narrowed our consciousness down

to awareness of our small self as a vulnerable individual

but our Ego still needed connection to the Self

to have psychic health

in this regard the Ego’s striving for security and perfection

is striving for death

because we kill our own life

by trying to control everyone else’s life

leaving no room for error or disruption

but sooner or later disruption happens

we lose our health or a loved one

and errors happen –

all this is an inevitable part of being human

so to counter this, God always calls all humans

to God’s version of perfection –

sharing in the Divine Life beyond all corruption –

Christ won victory over error/disruption/death

by dying and rising for all humans

so that all of us who live with Lady Wisdom

know faith is God’s Answer

to human versions of perfection

and human anxiety about an insecure future

by the grace of God, intimate friendship with the Risen Jesus

has always been central

to the spiritual life of authentic Christians –

this friendship allows us to love

our fellow human beings and our True Self

which fulfills God’s Commandments given to us in Judaism

and in modern Jewish thought –

“All real living is meeting other people”

– Martin Buber, Jewish theologian –

contrast this with the atheist

Jean-Paul Sartre:

“Hell is other people”

God’s version of perfection – faith in God –

saves us from every version of hell.

BEING AND LOVE

Our consciousness and therefore our subjectivity

cannot be explained

by science –

it just is –

it cannot be explained

by reference to anything more simple

because it is a fundamental/primary datum

similarly, True Love

cannot be explained –

it just is –

it requires being in the here and now

with your Beloved

practicing mindfulness

letting go of all distractions

making “quality time”

a habit

similarly, the Dharma of Buddhism

requires being here now

but it does not give you security

or a ground to stand on

because it is all about impermanence/groundlessness/

hopelessness – because as long as you hope

for being a better person

in a better place

you never accept who you are

and where you are

right now

you are never in the Here and Now

never in Love

the Enneagram is the face of Love –

it cannot be explained –

it just is –

the face of Christ

the face of God

the face of the True Human

since Jesus the Christ

is both the True Human and God

and has all the Enneagram virtues:

righteousness/compassion/excellence/creativity

wisdom/loyalty/discipline/power/peace

to the max.

“ENLIGHTENMENT”

The new cosmology does not contradict Christian faith

but resonates with it –

God is neither reduced to the creation event

nor to the universe

nor is separate from the universe

but God’s Presence is in and flows through ongoing creation –

God is in the world but not entirely of it –

everything is made of the same stuff as God – divinity

but is not the fullness of Divinity

God flows thru the universe

and thru the progressive stages of human ethics:

ego-centric care (for me)/ethno-centric care (for my group)/

world-centric care (for all humans)/universe-centric (care for all beings) –

each stage has a higher compassion

so not all hierarchies are bad

the more mature religious mind has developed

an alternative/wider way of seeing –

Buddhism/Hinduism/the Gospel of John

call it “enlightenment” –

“you are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14) –

the light of Christ shines thru all who belong to him

and is meant to shine into every dark corner of the world –

Christians call enlightenment “conversion”

Jesus calls it “salvation” or “the kingdom of God”

which is not a place or only exists in the afterlife

but is a new way of seeing and thinking

here and now

“In the early church ‘believe’

meant to ‘belove’ something –

to give your heart/soul/trust to it –

but now society has become so ‘enlightened’

that to ‘believe’ something means

‘to hold an opinion about it’

so formerly ‘to believe in God’ meant

you gave your whole self/heart/soul to God

now, ‘to believe in God’ is to be of the opinion

that God may exist”

– Wilfred Cantwell Smith