sacraments – Intelligent Christian Spirituality

Authentic Spirituality

Spirituality should move people from

mortality to immortality/

sin to salvation/

law to grace/

bondage to freedom/

ignorance to enlightenment/

suffering to fullness of life

without transformation religion is merely

the institutionalization of spirituality –

a belief and belonging system –

there is no change of consciousness/motivation –

conversion means moving from outer to inner authority

– from “the Church says”

to “given what the Church says

what also does the Holy Spirit/my conscience/

my experience say?” –

inner authority leads to the True Self/God within

true piety is not turning our face from West to East

true piety gives of its substance:

alms to the needy/strangers/travellers

ransoming of slaves

when I seek God, every event/moment/

sows God’s seeds in my will

and eventually Bibles burst out of my mouth

we are paradoxically both empty and full

full of emptiness/empty of fullness

and there is satisfaction in being empty

if we let God come in and fill us up

the divine/human encounter

in the Sacraments

is with my own True Self/the Church/God

and therefore should change

planetary/cosmic consciousness

transform the small/egoic self/the Church/

and the world’s cosmic messiness.

WAKING UP TO UNITY

David Bohm, the great physicist, proposed an “Implicate Order”

the undivided oneness/wholeness of all things:

“All things are internally related, which fits well with

quantum entanglement/non-locality/ spooky action at a distance”

A basic principle of quantum theology: God/the Divine

is creative energy, which includes and transcends

all traditional theology/everything previously said about God

Buddhists get their creative energy/peace/wisdom/joy/bliss

from practicing mindfulness and their joy has the power

to transform others

We are not transformed by sitting in a pew for an hour

once a week and listening to a sermon –

people learn any faith by hands-on training

as a novice/apprentice/journeyman/master

And Jesus, of course, was a master –

“Jesus inherited his father’s carpentry business

he was a master of the spirituality of business

and therefore was of the middle class, not poor –

out of compassion he became an outcast by choice”

– Albert Nolan

We normally begin the journey towards wholeness

by becoming baptized as an infant – by becoming an outcast

of godless society but part of the Beloved Community, the Church

“God can divinize us through baptism” – Gregory of Nazianzus

We can become part of the Implicate Order

the Universal Beloved Community

by experiencing God’s grace through all the “sacraments”

through all the “visible signs of God’s invisible love and grace”

which are constantly all around us

and through realizing our oneness with

God/others/nature

All we have to do is

wake up from our godless society’s

godless slumber.

Love, Sex and True Intimacy

If God is love, the universe is grounded in love and exists by and for love. Love is the purpose of the universe.

It was out of wanting to share love that God created the universe in such a way that matter intrinsically heads towards spirit. Through evolution creatures became more and more capable of love. Four billion years ago, Earth was rocks and water. Now there are human beings. Things have gone from pre-personal to personal and are heading towards the super-personal where all are filled with God and love God in return.

This fits with Jesus saying the greatest commandments are to “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love others as you love yourself” (Luke 10:27). Or as Eugene Peterson has it in The Message: “Love God with all your passion, prayer, intelligence and energy, and love others as well as you love yourself.”

Ilia Delio, a Franciscan nun, wrote in The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution and the Power of Love in a chapter titled “Love, Sex and the Cosmos” that sex is basically spiritual. It is the sacred life-force that drives the universe moving us from within with unitive desire. We all want union as intimately as possible with another human being. Sexual intercourse is the zenith of the personalization process of the universe, meant by God to be part of the way we find personal fulfillment.

Making love, in a broader sense, is the primordial “sacrament” that is the primordial “visible sign of God’s invisible love.” Making love underlies the seven church sacraments: baptism, reconciliation, communion, confirmation, marriage, holy orders and healing the sick. By “making love” I am not referring here to “sexual intercourse,” although intercourse could also be considered the primordial sacrament as God’s first words to humans were “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). Without intercourse there would be no human race, religion, church or sacraments.

Given all this, how did we end up with a widespread culture of sexual abuse and rape, as the “Me Too” movement testifies?

One explanation is that, as Martin Buber, the great Jewish theologian, wrote in his spiritual classic I and Thou, there are two basic ways of relating to everything: I-Thou and I-It. The I-Thou way sees everything as full of the presence of God. Everything is a sacred Thou, including humans, animals and all of nature.

However, in a technological consumer culture we tend to relate to everything as an It, that is as a thing to be used for our own self-centered purposes. We tend to use nature and humans as if they were things divorced from us.

A young woman once said “I am getting married because I got fed-up with the ‘hook-up’ culture where you are expected to have impersonal sex on the first date. It is easy to bare your body and have sex; it is hard to bare your soul and make love. I want true intimacy not fake ‘intimacy,’ a code word our culture uses for sexual intercourse.”

Sexual intercourse is for the few, but anyone can make love in the sense I am using it here, that is, opening up your soul and sharing who you really are with others. Vowed celibates and single people can make love in this sense. William Johnston, a Jesuit and leading writer on Christian mysticism, describes in his autobiography Mystical Journey how he and Amy Lim, a Japanese nun, had a decades-long intimate but non-sexual relationship when he lived and taught spirituality and theology in Japan.

For more information on how to make love in the spiritual sense, I would recommend Embracing the Beloved: Relationship as a Path of Awakening which describes a Buddhist way of intimacy as a “tandem inner journey towards spiritual realization.” Or read Pope John Paul II’s “theology of the body” as popularized by Christopher West.

At this Valentines/Family Day time of year, may we all learn to make love, that is, love one another as well as we love our self, opening our soul to our partners, family and friends and thus continue the universal personalization process initiated by God.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director, marriage coach and religious educator of adults. brucetallman.com