Category Archives: spirituality

From Matthew Fox -

The Cosmic Christ calls us to renewed worship: “Come to me all you who are burdened by lack of praise, lack of beauty, lack of vision in your lives. Look about you at the starry heavens and the deep, deep sea; at the amazing history that has birthed a home for you on this planet; at the surprise and joy of your existence. Gather together – you and your communities – in the context of this great, cosmic community to rejoice and give thanks. To heal and let go. To enter the dark and deep mysteries, to share the news, to break the bread of the universe and drink the blood of the cosmos itself in all its divinity. Be brave. Let your worship make you strong and great again. Never be bored again. Create yourselves, re-create your worlds, by the news you share and the visions you celebrate. Bring your sense of being microcosm in a vast macrocosm; bring your bodies; bring your play; bring your darkness and your pain. Gather and do not scatter. Learn to not take for granted and learn this together. Become a people. Worship together.

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Posted in Community, Quotes, spirituality

Tagged Christ, Community, Matthew Fox, Religion and Spirituality, spirituality

We must be perfectly open and simple, without prejudices and without artificial theories about ourselves. We must learn to speak according to our own inner truth, as far as we can perceive it. We must learn to say what we really mean in the depths of our soul, not what we think we are expected to say, not what somebody else has just said. And we must be prepared to take responsibility for our desires, and accept the consequences…

True simplicity implies love and trust – it does not expect to be derided and rejected, any more than it expects to be admired and praised. It simply hopes to be accepted on its own terms. This is the kind of atmosphere which a good director tries to produce: an atmosphere of confidence and friendliness in which the [directee] can say anything that is on his [or her] mind with the assurance that it will be dealt with frankly and honestly… Anything he or she says that is genuine, that really comes from the heart, will be understood and accepted by a wise director. Such real, genuine aspiration of the heart are sometimes very important indications of the will of God for that soul – and sometimes they must be sacrificed.

This gives us a clue to what the director is really seeking to find out from us. He does not merely want to know our problems, our difficulties, our secrets. And that is why one should not think that a direction session that does not tackle a problem has not been a success. The director wants to know our inmost self, our real self. He wants to know us not as we are in the eyes of men, or even as we are in our own eyes, but as we are in the eyes of God. He wants to know the inmost truth of our vocation, the action of grace in our souls. His direction is, in reality, nothing more than a way of leading us to see and obey our real Director – the [Spirit of the Divine], hidden in the depths of our soul. We must never for get that in reality we are not directed and taught by men, and that if we need human “direction” it is only because we cannot, without man’s help, come into contact with that “anointing (of the Spirit) which teaches us all things.” (1 John 2:20)

- Thomas Merton, Spiritual Direction & Meditation

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Posted in spiritual direction, spirituality

Tagged Divinity, God, Spirit, Spiritual direction, spirituality, thomas merton

Thomas Merton, from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream.

…though “out of the world,” [monks] are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest. We take a different attitude to all these things, for we belong to God. Yet so does everybody else belong to God.We just happen to be conscious of it, and to make a profession out of this consciousness. But does that entitle us to consider ourselves different, or even better, than others? The whole idea is preposterous.

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.” To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking.

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

This changes nothing in the sense and value of my solitude, for it is in fact the function of solitude to make one realize such things with a clarity that would be impossible to anyone completely immersed in the other cares, the other illusions, and all the automatisms of a tightly collective existence. My solitude, however, is not my own, for I see now how much it belongs to them — and that I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone, they are not “they” but my own self. There are no strangers.

Henri Nouwen, from The Genesee Diary

I am becoming more and more aware that solitude indeed makes you more sensitive to the good in people and even enables you to bring it to the foreground. No, “there is no way of telling people that they are all walk around shining like the sun” but God’s glory in you can bring out God’s glory in the other when you have become more conscious of this shared gift. God speaks to God, Spirit to Spirit, Love to Love. It is all a gift, it is all grace.

Namaste…

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I wonder if I have a tendency to avoid going the extra mile when I start getting deep into my spiritual practice. I have been reading Henri Nouwen‘s The Genesee Diary, and he talks a lot about his meetings with his spiritual director, John Eudes. John was saying that when the normal distractions are gone – like attention, talking, normal relationships – we begin to focus on our base desires. Sex, food, sleep.

“In a sense, you fall apart, you regress, but it is also there that you become available for spiritual direction and can find a place for prayer and ascetical life. It is all a very sensitive thing. It can also lead to an egocentric preoccupation. You need guidance to prevent that.”

This is the last mile that I so often avoid. Turning the intensity outward to prayer and service rather that getting so preoccupied with self.

Nouwen also wrote earlier of what he was reading from the desert fathers.

Nothing is more harmful than self-direction, nothing more fatal… I never allowed myself to follow my thought without asking advice” (Instructions of Dorotheus of Gaza)

And this, too, is so poignant for our times. How often it is that we seek to find out own way, make our own decisions… “my spiritual journey is my own personal thing and I keep it to myself mostly.” My friends, as good as this sounds, it is not the way to move forward in the spiritual life. We must not separate ourselves from the saints, the fathers and the mothers, that have come before us, whatever religion they may be. They will always tell us of the need for a director, a spiritual companion, a confessor, a community.

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Posted in Quotes, spirituality

Tagged Community, Dorotheus of Gaza, Genesee Diary, God, henri nouwen, Spiritual direction, Spiritual practice, spirituality

From Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

“To the trained eye ego-climbing an selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then the it will be ‘here.’ What he is looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort both physically and spiritually because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.”

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Tagged Quotes, spirituality, Zen