energy – Intelligent Christian Spirituality

WHAT CONTEMPLATIVES KNOW

God is real, unlike the mythical gods

who have no existence at all.

But God is no body and no soul

God is the life of the soul

which is the life of the body –

God is the Life of lives.

Until the 1960s, people were taught meditation

as an exercise of the rational mind

drawing upon the three powers of the soul:

memory/understanding (reason)/will.

There was no training in contemplation –

the experience of the living God in silence.

The contemplative person eventually realizes

s/he no longer knows what God is

because God is not a thing but a Thou

who constantly says “I AM”

which allows me to constantly say “I am, too!”

God makes me real.

All the contemplative knows is: God is Love –

the core energy of evolution and its goal.

Love-energy is the most universal/tremendous/

mysterious of all cosmic forces –

“The physical structure of the universe is love” –

Teilhard de Chardin

But what gets in the way of love is anxiety –

“Anxiety is the greatest evil that can befall a soul, except sin” –

Saint Francis de Sales

To combat anxiety we need to stay focused on God

particularly the Incarnate God, the Christ

who shows us “Perfect love casts out fear” (I John 4:18).

Indeed, the hymn in Colossians 1: 15-20 makes Christ’s divinity

as great or greater than the prologue of John’s Gospel

(John 1: 1-18) which declares that

Jesus is not only God

as the Cosmic Christ

He created the whole cosmos

and is its goal: The Beginning and the End –

the Alpha and the Omega.

COSMOS/THEOS/ANTHROPOS

Copernicus/Galileo/Newton opened the door

to the new cosmology – there is more to the universe

than Earth as its center, and gravity connects us

not only to Earth but to the stars. It is all one!

You can let the ki/chi/energy of the whole universe

flow thru your body

thru deep rhythmical abdominal breathing –

breath is central to all Asian forms of meditation

and in the mythology of some Asian religions

the universe was created

thru the intercourse of the gods.

Similarly, a Christian mystic in the fifth century

named Pseudo-Dionysius believed that

Creation is an outpouring of Divine Ecstasy –

the Big Bang is God’s Orgasm!

In the magical/mythical pre-rational religious stage

myths about God are taken literally

for example, God is an angry Old White Man

detached from humans and living far away in the sky.

In the post-rational (but not anti-rational) religious stage

God is Spirit – the unitive Ground of Being

a timeless Presence accessed by unity-consciousness.

These two religious stages were separated

by the renewal/new dawn of reason

in the so-called ‘Enlightenment.’

Christians need a new dawn too –

we must no longer stand with Saint Augustine

who separated grace from nature

causing our current environmental crisis

but with Saint Irenaeus who saw everything in this world

as good/a manifestation of God’s grace –

grace is in nature and therefore in human nature!

We cannot grow spiritually

if we separate our humanness from spirituality

and we cannot grow in humanness

if we separate out our spirituality –

good anthropology is foundational to good theology

and good theology is foundational to good cosmology.

THE ENERGY THAT UNITES ALL

Though humans are made of both body and soul

they are one

and through them the material world

reaches its crown

and raises its voice

to praise its Creator.

Therefore, the only gift God requires of us

is our being – with all its imperfections.

When we realize we are lovable

because God loves us

despite our weakness/sin/imperfection

it quickens our self-love.

For the great Anglican theologian John Macquarrie

even our limitations and death point to transcendence –

death gives structure and perspective to life

and raises the hope of immortal life.

Therefore, we should approach our earthly life

not as a problem to be solved

but as an adventure to be lived

with our mind and heart open to whatever arises

until Sister Death welcomes us into life forever

in the glorious presence of our Creator.

Spirituality is giving life one’s all.

Therefore, anyone who gives their all

to their family/work/country/justice/art

is a spiritual person – whether they acknowledge God or not.

For many men, all-out devotion to their work or their family

is their way of being good/spiritual/a saint –

maybe they are not workaholics

maybe they are addicted to love.

After all, deep erotic energy exists at the heart of the cosmos

and becomes manifest in human ministry/family life/marriage/sexuality –

the desire to love and be loved – the One Source of spirituality and sexuality –

this desire is the cosmic energy

that unites God/humans/the universe.

RETURNING TO RADICAL AMAZEMENT

The sexual/social/self-preservation drives

are the raw material of who we are as humans

and so cannot be killed off

although ascetics try their hardest.

According to Rohr/Rolheiser/Fox

these drives are all good and just need to be

harnessed/channeled/integrated not killed off

so they give energy to our spiritual endeavours

and serve us not destroy us – they are good

not evil monsters/dragons/demons.

According to Immanuel Kant as you move morally

from being biocentric (sex and survival) to egocentric

to ethnocentric to worldcentric (universal compassion)

you also discover your higher/truer/deeper self.

If you expand your heart and mind infinitely

you come to God’s Infinite Love, the “Ultimate Thou”

and to your self as the “Ultimate I”

culminating in the “Ultimate I-Thou Relationship.”

But as we take on jobs/get married/join religions

everyone pressures us to do

in order for us to live up to their ideals

and as we shove more and more stuff

into our shadow-bag

by midlife we are a mere slice

of the 360-degree-self we started with.

We become fraught with “sins of omission”

including: not living lives of justice/

not being transformed/being ‘born again’

only once instead of many times/

leaving creativity/divinization/original blessing/

the cosmos out of our theology.

Radical Amazement by Judy Cannato

invites us back into contemplative awe/awareness

of black holes/supernovas/the wonders of the universe

which are the key to self-transformation

and transformation of the world.

3 Big Ideas for May 29, 2019

Teilhard de Chardin’s insight into love-energy as the core energy of evolution – evolution always moves towards creating creatures with a greater capacity for love (from invertebrates to vertebrates to mammals to humans) – this gives a new perspective on the nature of cosmic reality. If everything is internally related by love, nothing is autonomous or independent. For any creature, to “be” is to “be-with” or to “inter-be.” We are all “interbeings.” Everything depends on everything else. For you to exist, you need clouds and rain and seeds and soil and farmers. Whatever we are doing to the Earth we are doing to ourselves. This awareness has to be our new foundation: the Earth is us and we are the Earth.
Any student of comparative mythology knows that, throughout the ancient world, there are common themes of death and resurrection and overcoming our mortality with immortality. Osiris and Mithra and Adonis are supposed to have achieved this. However, in Jesus the Christ, the myths became reality. God entered history and changed it forever.
In God’s plan, the Cosmic Christ, who becomes incarnate as a human being, has universal primacy and universal meaning in human history. He becomes the arrowhead that points us towards our next stage of evolution: to become divinized human beings. Of course, we can only do this if we get our egos out of the way and let God’s Spirit fill us to the brim.

3 Big Ideas for May 15, 2019

Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian mystic who believed that love and energy are the foundation of the cosmos. This “love-energy” is the source of the universe’s intelligibility and therefore the basis of knowledge. This leads philosophy out of the impasse of making matter the basis of all empirical knowledge. Philosophers have traditionally made love secondary to knowledge – you have to first know something before you can love it. But for lovers of God like Teilhard, love is the source and goal of all knowledge.
Christian martyrs were willing to die for their faith because they believed “all is one” – everything, including life and death, is under the care of God. Now we have arrived at a similar state by the reverse process: we no longer believe there is a God, all is passing away, and therefore all is meaningless. Without God, all is not one, it is zero. The martyr was willing to die for God, but would the secular non-believer be willing to die for zero? This is important when you are speaking truth to power and fighting injustice.
Almost everything wrong with the world has to do with the way the “It” of institutions can be misaligned, out of control, and disconnect with the “I” and the “We.” The personal is destroyed by the impersonal when corporations, governments, and religious institutions become out of touch with the people they are meant to serve, and only serve themselves. The result is exploitation of others for money or sex, and rape of the planet’s resources on which we all depend. Unitive thinking, the idea that all is one, keeps the “It” of hierarchies connected to the common good, the “We.”

3 Big Ideas for May 9, 2019

The cornerstone of spirituality is that God, in a plan of sheer goodness, created humans to share in God’s own blessed life. Love is therefore the principal energy in the universe, and the direction of evolution is towards greater wholeness and consciousness, toward greater love.
Contemplation of God is not ecstasy, trance, enthusiasm, or mystic frenzy. These things are not the work of the “deep self.” They are the flooding into consciousness of the dionysian emotions of the “id” from the subconscious. Spiritual practice is also not about accomplishing, winning, or losing. It is about stopping struggling and relaxing with reality, accepting reality as it is, not making it the enemy.
Henri Nouwen is the Kierkegaard of our generation because like Kierkegaard he has taught us Christian existentialism: how to pray while not knowing how to pray, to rest while being restless, to be at peace while being tempted, to feel safe while still being anxious, to be surrounded by light while still in darkness, to love while still doubting.

3 Big Ideas for April 23, 2019

In the Jewish Book of Wisdom it says that Wisdom was there in the beginning, co-creating everything with God. Wisdom is an early intuition of the Cosmic Christ or the Holy Spirit. In the Christian scriptures Christ is seen as the wisdom and power of God. By applying themselves to philosophy, history, science and the arts, people are enlightened by that Wisdom or the Cosmic Christ who is all around us and was there from the beginning.
Christian praxis (practice) is meant to spread the kingdom of love, the reign of God, by transforming social structures and laws that oppress people. The classic example would be the Jim Crow laws in the United States that kept everything segregated even though slavery had officially ended. Blacks got the worst schools, medical care, etc. The great Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, wrote that “Justice is the proper distribution of love throughout society. Only love can transform us while uniting us to everything. Love is the opposite of segregation.
In 1998, two independent teams of scientists discovered “dark energy,” an anti-gravitational force that is causing the universe to accelerate its expansion. 70% of the universe is dark energy, 25% is dark matter, only 5% of the universe is visible. Science keeps revealing how mysterious God is. Einstein said that it is not that one thing is a miracle, everything is a miracle!

3 Big Ideas for April 18, 2019

Every spiritual path begins with a founder who experiences a deep spiritual conversion. Then his followers turn this I-THOU relationship between the founder and God into an I-IT relationship by developing beliefs, creeds, rituals, and institutions. And the gap grows between the founder’s experience and his disciples’ lives as the founder fades away in historical time. We need to constantly try to recapture the founder’s original experience.
D. H. Lawrence, mostly known for his erotic novels, was also a spiritual man who wrote that our deepest religious urge is to come into direct contact with the deep elemental life of the cosmos and to derive energy and life from it. He believed that erotic energy underlies everything in the universe, and that God is not only “agape” (suffering love) but also “eros” (the power of attraction) which expresses itself most fully in human sexuality. When the masculine energy of the universe meets the feminine energy, fire happens.
In his “Discourse on Mindful Breathing,” the Buddha taught “Breathing in, I recognize my feeling. Breathing out, I calm my feeling.” Christian monks teach similar spiritual practices. Medical science has now proven them both right: when you inhale and then slowly let your breath out, the breathing out activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which has a calming effect on your whole body. Science is gradually catching up with and proving wisdom taught by ancient religion.