The Open Soul - Part 9

Grace is a dangerous idea

Paradoxically, it is not knowledge that enlightens, but unknowing.

It is not the lack of doing or wrongdoing that are darkness but is instead the pursuit of meaning through doing.

It is in the open space of unknowing and un-judging that is created by grace where peace and love are born.

Without this self-emptying, we will naturally divide good from bad and restrict what we will accept.

We cannot love our enemy because there will be things in the enemy that we reject, we cannot love the enemy in ourselves because there are things in ourselves we have rejected, we cannot love the world, because there will be things in reality we reject. 

Thus, love can only exist when the field of grace is open and sin is no-thing. 

When sin is something, we judge it and fear it, when sin is no-thing, we have nothing to fear; from ourselves, from others or from the chaotic reality of life.

In this way, the paradox of light as the open space of unknowing created by grace allows us to “have fellowship with one another” (1 John 1:5-7), with ourselves and with the world. 

Grace has always been a dangerous and heretical idea. Christ was crucified as a heretic for living a life of radical grace. Meister Eckhart was tried and accused as a heretic. With grace we empty ourselves of all control and place ourselves in the hands of God - or in the hands of reality (call it what you will) - with no way to control how goodness or blessing is accessed.

With grace we have stepped out of the boat and onto the water, and it is here that we find the open space into which God can create.

But remember - if we have let go of our ideas about “god” as good or compassionate - we have no idea what will be created.

The Open Soul - Part 8

The quest for meaning casts us out of an open acceptance of reality and into an anxious pursuit that never finds fulfillment.

“From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Matthew 16:21-23

The modern philosopher Slavoj Zizek echoes Christ’s rebuke of Peter (when Peter rejects the reality that God will die) when he speaks about “the pressure of meaning” as the place “the devil waits upon you.” Like Hessert (see “The Open Soul - Part 7) , he asserts that we should reject the meaning-making narrative.

Christianity is the acceptance of meaninglessness.[1] Both Hessert and Zizek use the holocaust as an example of why we must move away from meaning making. In the holocaust, (as in the crucifixion) God cannot be found through power or meaning, but must be found in their absence.[2] In the face of such great evil, truths are so traumatic, they resist being integrated into the universe of meaning.[3]

It is only the suffering God (Christ crucified) that answers such questions. In Christ crucified, God moves from Objectivity (a transcendent Master who can pull the strings from above and make things as they should be) to Subjectivity (an infinite plurality whose nature cannot be defined)[4]. Zizek cautions us to not try to make meaning of the crucifixion, but to allow it to be what it was – the destruction of God and in this way a revelation of the destruction of ultimate meaning.[5]

Hessert articulates this in this way:

“Christ crucified is the end of the expectation that power will bring life to its fulfillment in the sense of actualizing its present potential. Faith in Christ crucified means giving up the kind of justification of life that realizing one’s potential would offer. There is thus a direct correlation between faith as the surrender of the claim to divine power and “Christ crucified” which is the absence of such divine power.”[6]

The Judeo-Christian tradition may have been inviting us to move away from this quest for ultimate meaning from the beginning. The Eden story can be seen as a cautionary tale against the quest for meaning. Eve’s pursuit of knowledge to make meaning worked in the opposite way intended and rather than creating meaning, cast her and Adam out of paradise.

The all too human quest for meaning is the proverbial forbidden fruit, the ultimate idolatry. It casts us out of an open acceptance of the reality that is and into an anxious pursuit that never finds fulfillment.

It is only through absolute emptying of self and trust in grace that the human is freed from the need for meaning-making and is able to live in a space where we are ”not glad because of any special thing or …distressed by anything at all, for all will be well”[7]

[1] Slavoj Zizek. “The Pressure of Meaning” 25:08-25:58  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qVAxuHRKOw

[2] Hessert, 29.

[3] Slavoj Zizek, “Only a Suffering God can Save Us.” Lacan.com, accessed December 14, 2022, https://www.lacan.com/zizshadowplay.html  Section 2 Kierkegaard

[4] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. ed. Margaret Canovan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10.

[5] Slavoj Zizek, “Only a Suffering God can Save Us.” Lacan.com, accessed December 14, 2022, https://www.lacan.com/zizshadowplay.html  Section 2 Kierkegaard

[6] Paul Hessert. Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion. Rockport MA: Element Inc. Out of Print (1993): 31.

[7] Norwich, 153.

The Open Soul - Part 7

Christ Crucified is an invitation into meaninglessness

Can human beings make meaning in the world if they have let go of ideas of good and evil, light and darkness, even God to such a degree?

The apostle Paul spoke of this when he said that Jews were looking for signs and Greeks for wisdom, but he preached only Christ crucified. (1 Corinthians 1:22-25). To Jews, signs were a way of interpreting God’s favor and making meaning through power,[1] and to Greeks knowledge and understanding satisfied the human impulse to make meaning through making sense of things. 

Christ crucified is the breakdown of the use of power to move to a more ideal situation and a breakdown of what makes sense. “It is the absence of divine confirmation of human values.” [2] In this way it not a way to make meaning, but is an invitation into meaninglessness, or as Meister Eckhart might say, into nothingness.

[1] Paul Hessert. Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion. (Rockport MA: Element Inc., 1993. Out of Print), 19.

[2] Hessert, 26.

The Open Soul - Part 6

Jesus was inviting them to let go of everything – even God .

Immediately following Peter’s rejection of reality, Jesus speaks to his disciples about self-denial, 

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”  (Matthew 16:24-25, NRSV).

The self-denial that he spoke of was not fasting, or sexual abstinence, it was not giving up sleep or fun as many of the church fathers presumed, but was the emptying Miester Echkart described - an emptying of self, a kenosis that consents to be nothing, to do nothing, to know nothing.

Jesus was inviting them to let go of everything – even God (himself). In this kind of emptying, the self becomes a no-thing, sin becomes a no-thing and even more radically, God becomes no-thing.

Peter Rollins states that “speaking of God is never speaking of God but only ever speaking about our understanding of God.”[1] Our self-denial must be absolute, including even our ideas of God and our grasp on God. Our ideas of God are idols.

Simone Weil echoes Eckhart again when she says that God cannot be contained and thus our intuitions are tainted by human imagination and fantasy.[2] In this way, faith requires that God must become a no-thing to us, because God is necessarily not an object.[3] Weil adds that the object of attention must be nonexistent for another reason as well. Spiritual life is perfected in attention made of God’s love for God. Thus, the subject and object are identical with the activity of attention itself. This attention leads us deeper into the nonexistence of the object of attention.[4]

Perhaps the most radical aspect of this is the letting go Eckhart speaks of – letting go even ideas about God being good or compassionate.[5]

[1] Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, (Brewster Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2006), 34.

[2] Simone Weil. Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (Lincoln Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) 147-149.

[3] Hase Shoto. “The Structure of Faith: Nothingness-qua-Love” in The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajme: The Metanoetic Imperative. trans. T. Unno and J. Heisig (Berkely: Asian Humanities Press, 1990, 90-96.

[4] Simone Weil. Waiting for God. (Pennsylvania: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1st ed., 2009) 107, 112.

[5] Eckhart, 55.

The Open Soul - Part 4

Grace is not the forgiveness of sin, but rather it is the space for sin. It creates the conditions under which creation can occur.

Spirituality is full of imagery of light and darkness.

The apostle John uses light and darkness imagery to describe God when he says God is light that contains no darkness at all (1 John 1:5, NRSV), and that all things are created through light that is Christ (John 1:3-4, NRSV).

Traditionally, and perhaps because of scriptures such as these, light has been equated to holiness, purity and righteousness and darkness has been synonymous with impurity, sin and evil. Access to God and God’s creative force has been understood to be a life in the light of holiness and an avoidance of darkness and sin.  Julian of Norwich’s insights into the idea of sin were a beautiful glimpse into a type of radical grace that Christendom has largely missed.

She saw that God was in everything and for this reason, sin cannot be a thing.[1] This revelation that sin is no-thing is new to Julian and she asks Jesus about it. Jesus reveals to her that “sin is necessary,”[2] because it “purges us and makes us know ourselves.”[3] In this way, sin is not a darkness that is an antithesis to the light that creates, but is instead a creative force within us and the light-as-good vs. darkness-as-evil duality is broken down.

This is much like the biological principal of error on the genome which, although it has the potential to destroy, also contains the mechanism for evolution, adaptation and continued life.

Julian concludes from her revelations that “sin is not shameful to man, but his glory”[4] This view of sin takes us away from shame, and is the very definition of grace.

In this way, grace opens a space that allows for sin. Grace is not the forgiveness of sin, but rather it is the space for sin. It creates the conditions under which creation can occur.

Grace does not reject or erect walls through shame, it embraces and makes no judgement or condemnation. It is only through grace that we can hold our souls open to both good and error. It is only through a loving embrace of all that is, that Christ can create something new in us, even when the mechanism for creation comes through sin.

It is grace that releases judgement and takes us into the place described by Meister Eckhart where we have let go of our pre-conceived ideas.[5]

Grace lets go of all things and simultaneously opens up to all things. It opens the soul to accept every aspect of our humanity and the humanity of others – even our enemies.

In this way, light is not about a purity culture that accepts some things as good and rejects others as evil, but light takes on a new meaning – the meaning of grace – and darkness becomes nothing more than not consenting to grace.

[1] Julian of Norwich. Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 136, 166.

[2] Ibid, 148

[3] Ibid, 149

[4] Amy Laura Hall. Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 85.

[5] Eckhart, 34, 36, 49. 55.

The Open Soul - Part 3

We stumble and fall, NOT when we disobey regarding good deeds, or right belief, but when we disobey the word of grace.

We understand on an intellectual level that if we have tasted that the Lord is good (gracious) it will undo shame, but we find in practice that shame persists.

Peter points out this very phenomenon when he says the very goodness (grace) that undoes shame is also the stone that makes men stumble and the rock that makes them fall.

We stumble and fall, not when we disobey the word regarding good deeds, or believing rightly, not when we violate quid-pro-quo, but when we disobey the word of grace.

This caution against disobedience to grace is throughout scripture from the beginning. In the Eden story, Eve disobeys the word of grace when she believes the lie that some action is needed to access God. She believes that she should know good from evil, light from darkness, rather than resting in the paradise of grace, and when she eats the fruit of this lie, she falls from grace and into shame.

The Open Soul - Part 2

The very cornerstone of the gospel is the stumbling block itself.

The doctrine of Grace has been watered down by religion - because real grace is a hard pill to swallow.

Grace and the notion that something is given randomly, freely and without justification offends human ideas around justice and never more so than in modern times when more than ever, humans are focused on ideas of justice and human rights.[1]

Justice doesn’t just factor into our politics, it factors heavily into cultural and religious ideas of good and evil.

I’m not saying I’ve got anything against justice — I’ve always been oriented toward what is fair (maybe too much).

But ideas like good comes to those who earn it or bad comes to evildoers just isn’t what Jesus was trying to get at. In Matthew 20, we read a parable told by Jesus about laborers who worked unequal time and got paid equally. In Luke 15, we read a parable told by Jesus about a son who sins and is still welcomed and celebrated by his father.

We’ve heard those parables a hundred times. We recognize they are about grace and can see how they were meant to confront ideas of God demanding a quid-pro-quo, and yet strangely, Christian doctrine and practice is shot through with shame and punishment for sin and reward for goodness. In the area of grace, Christianity looks less like Christ and more like the courts.

The apostle Peter talks about how the goodness of God can undo shame in the following:

2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation3 if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

4 Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and 5 like living stones let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For it stands in scripture:

“See, I am laying in Zion a stone,
    a cornerstone chosen and precious,
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”

7 This honor, then, is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe,

“The stone that the builders rejected
    has become the very head of the corner,”

8 and

“A stone that makes them stumble
    and a rock that makes them fall.”

They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.” (1 Peter 2:2-8, NRSVUE)

I used to read this to mean that those who believe in Jesus would not be put to shame and those who don’t believe in Jesus - those who reject Jesus - those who disobey Jesus - will stumble. They WILL be put to shame.

But is that really it? That seems a little at odds with the prodigal son story doesn’t it?

Maybe the key is to ask just exactly who and what is this cornerstone we are believing in? Sure, it’s Jesus, but what does that mean? What if the cornerstone that is Jesus is the cornerstone of grace? The Jesus who did not judge the woman caught in adultery . The Jesus who welcomed the prodigal with a feast. The Jesus who told the thief on the cross he would be with him in paradise. The Jesus who ate with tax collectors, prostitutes, “sinners.” The Jesus who said he did not come to judge the world.

The Jesus who was grace living and breathing. What else could undo shame better than that Jesus? The Jesus of grace?

But THAT’s a Jesus people stumble over.

People like a loving Jesus. They like a kind Jesus. They even like the Jesus who turns over tables and whips the temple back into shape. But it’s harder to like the Jesus who lets people off the hook. It’s hard not to stumble on the idea that I might work a full day and get the same pay as the slacker who shows up at 4:45 and puts in 15 minutes. It’s hard not to stumble on the idea that I might live a good life and get the same blessings from God as the guy who is an asshole or worse.

That’s offensive. It’s a stumbling block.

And it’s the very cornerstone of the gospel. Grace.

And Christianity has missed it.

[1] Charles Taylor. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1989), 11.

The Open Soul - Part 1

We must let go - even of our ideas about God being good or compassionate

The pursuit of spirituality at its core, is for most, an attempt to connect to the transcendent. From the first story we read in the Judeo-Christian scriptures about Eve who eats the fruit in order to “be more like God,” to modern day spiritual leaders and practitioners, we see the common theme is the human being trying to figure out what mindset, what actions, what emotions one must have to access the divine. The medieval theologian and mystic, Meister Eckhart put forth that the place where God speaks, and works had less to do with right action, right emotion or right mindset and more to do with space. Eckhart calls this open space the “potential of receptivity.”[1] He says that we create space through silence and stillness and await a birth within us. “There must be a silence and a stillness, and the Father must speak in that.”[2] Eckhart affirms that this birth has nothing to do with good deeds or religious purity as we think of it but rather, it occurs in both sinners and saints – even those in hell.[3] Eckhart speaks of creating a space through the practice of silence and stillness that is absolute and is far more extreme than most Christian practices. It includes letting go of images,[4] understanding,[5] intellect,[6] memory, sense perceptions, imagination and even ideas about God being good or compassionate.[7]

Can we really let go in this way? Images? Understanding? Intellect? Memory? Sense Perception? Imagination ?

Even our ideas about God being good or compassionate?

How could this be possible?

This kind of extreme emptying of the self is a radically different approach from what is typically seen in religious pursuits. Throughout history, followers of the Christian faith have attempted to understand and control connection to the divine not by letting go of images, understanding, and ideas about the goodness of God, but by pursuing and refining them. Asceticism, holiness, purity, good works, right theology, liturgy and iconography have all served as means by which the religious observer might access God. Beliefs that it is the holy person who will be capable of miracles and who will receive good things from God, or that it is the one who believes rightly who will be saved, or that sin and error will separate us from God are central to most Christian doctrine and practice.

But ….

Christian Scripture disagrees. Much like Eckhart’s ideas about the birth of God occurring equally in saints and sinners, the Scriptures tell us that “the Spirit blows where it wishes,” (John 3:8, NRSV), and God blesses both the evil and the good (Matthew 5:45, NRSV).

The idea of access to the divine being entirely unconditional and free and being disconnected from ideas and actions is a difficult one for most. To disconnect ourselves from ideas about good and evil, light and darkness, right and wrong action  – even the goodness of God seems not only counterintuitive to the pursuit of spirituality, but counter to our very nature as thinking humans. Paradoxically it is the move away from such ideas that is at the heart of Christianity in the doctrine of grace.

[1] Meister Eckhart. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart with foreword by Bernard McGinn, trans. Maurice O’C Walshe. (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2009), 56.

[2] Ibid, 32, 33.

[3] Eckhart, 40.

[4] Ibid, 34.

[5] Ibid, 36.

[6] Ibid, 49.

[7] Ibid, 55.

How can I feel better?

Grace is not in the business of making us feel better. 

Capitalism, like many aspects of cultures and societies is built on a narrative.  The narrative is that if we just get this or that thing, achievement, experience, we will feel better.  Happier.  Safer. 

For some, it’s material:  If I just get the house, the car, the status symbol purse, the right size diamond, I will feel I’ve arrived.

For some it’s relational:  If I just get married, have kids, have sex with that hottie I will feel lovable.    

For some it’s achievement:  If I get the job, get the degree, make the money, nail the performance, lose the weight, ace the quarterly evaluation, I will feel better about myself.

You get my point.  It’s a goal, or a thing out there we don’t have, that we feel in some way, if we get it, our lives will be better. 

To be sure, having a secure income IS better than living in poverty and having a place to live IS better than being homeless, but the narrative that capitalism depends upon is that once you get the basic necessities you need, more will always be better.  If having a place to live is good, then having an even nicer place to live will be even better. 

It depends on there being no satisfaction, no endpoint.  It depends on us never giving up on the belief in the narrative that more of “X” equals more feeling better. 

The fly in the ointment is that as we participate in this game, we find that the narrative isn’t true.  We get the thing and we don’t feel better.  Not really.  We are still anxious and lonely.  We still feel inadequate and full of doubt.  We don’t feel safe.  We wonder if we belong or if we measure up. 

Capitalism depends upon us never identifying that the narrative that getting “X” will make us feel better is, in fact, a lie.   If we admitted this lie to ourselves, we would stop consuming as much.  We would keep the same house, car, couch, purse, clothing as long as they were functional and would not be compelled to upgrade. 

So, our society works very hard to keep the lie hidden and to find someone or something else to blame.  Maybe it’s the immigrants, maybe it’s the Trumpers, maybe it’s the Supreme Court, or the President, or religion, or the liberals.  Maybe it’s the people wearing masks, or the media, or the police. 

To be sure, the things I just listed are problematic.  All of them.  In fact, everything in one way or another is problematic.  But the thing to recognize is that they are not to blame.  If we scapegoat them, it obscures real problem – the lie that underpins capitalism. 

You see, if I recognize that getting, or doing, or being “X” will not make me feel better but that the way I feel – all the anxiety and inadequacy, all the loneliness and longing – is just the human condition, then I won’t see anything or anyone as the villain in my story.  They/it are not the reason I feel this way.  I have no need to hate them or make an enemy of them.  I have no need to conquer them or change them so that I will feel better.  We all feel this way.  All the time. 

This recognition is at the heart of grace.  Grace says nothing more is needed.  Grace lets things be just as they are.  Grace recognizes that we are all human with all our flaws and inadequacies, all our unfulfilled longings and hopes.  Grace lets all that be.  Grace is not in the business of changing things.  Grace is not in the business of making us feel better.  And strangely, when we let go of trying to feel better….

We feel better

To comment click on the header “How can I feel better?”

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The spot you are headed to

Release your responses and return to a place of rest.

“ It was evening and had grown quite dark and Jesus had not yet returned. His disciples went down to the sea, got in the boat, and headed back across the water to Capernaum. A huge wind blew up, churning the sea. They were maybe three or four miles out when they saw Jesus walking on the sea, quite near the boat. They were scared senseless, but he reassured them, “It’s me. It’s all right. Don’t be afraid.” So they took him on board and immediately they reached land—the exact spot they were headed to” John 6:16-21

This was the passage that was read to me in a guided meditation called “Lectio Divina” recently. If you’ve never heard of Lectio Divina, it is the practice of a contemplative interaction with a text - usually a sacred or religious text of some kind. Everyone does it just a little different, but my favorite method is:

1) Rest. Take a moment to become still and present to the moment. Breathe, close your eyes and become relaxed. Express your willingness to open to the voice of spirit.

2) Read. Choose a short passage - read it slowly. Listen for a word or phrase that is addressed to you. What jumps our at you? What “shimmers”? Allow for a few moments of silent repetition of the word or phrase. Savor it. Ponder it. Listen to it without judging or analyzing.

3) Reflect. Read the passage again. Slowly. Listen for how this passage connects with your life. What do you need to hear.

4) Respond. Read the passage a third time. Slowly. This time, imagine yourself in the story. Who are you in the scene? What do you hear, see, smell, feel? How is this connected to your life? What is your response? Allow your response to flow spontaneously from your heart as fully and as truly as you can. At this point you are entering into a personal dialogue with spirit “sharing the feelings the text has aroused in you, feelings such as love, joy, sorrow, anger, remorse, desire, need, conviction, consecration. “ Observe your response without judging.

5) Rest. Release your responses and return to a place of rest. This is a posture of yieldedness and abandon.

6) Record. Journal about the experience.

So, in my interaction with the story from John 6, it occurred to me that as soon as the disciples saw Jesus in the situation and took him in, they were at their destination. Is this some miracle where Jesus got them to shore immediately? Or is it that when we take the Christ consciousness into our boat, we are immediately present and thus at the spot we need to be at. It’s so easy to miss the sacred in a difficult situation. It’s so natural to fight, resist and shut down out of fear. We don’t see the spirit in the storms, we just strive to find peace or to come ashore. But as soon as we are able to hear the voice of the sacred that says “I’m here - don’t be afraid” and we take the sacred into our boat, we are already at our destination. There is nowhere further to get to. We are home.

I am doing some work in counseling these days. By work in counseling, I mean work on myself, in myself. Pulling up some stuff that I’ve shoved down. Dealing with it and more importantly feeling it. I have a tremendous capacity for compartmentalization. I can set things aside so that I am not slowed down by them. I can tell you about my feelings, but actually feeling them in my body is much harder. It makes me tired. I don’t like to be tired. It slows me down and keeps me from doing all the things.

I’m trying to see the sacred in the tired. Welcome it into my boat. Sleep. Let it take me to the exact spot I am headed to - this moment.

To Comment click on the header “The spot you are headed to”

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