You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Discipleship’ category.
… it is difficult for churches, government, and leaders to move beyond ego, the desire for control, and public posturing. Everything divides into oppositions … vested interests pulling against one another. Truth is no longer possible at this level of conversation.
… you can lead people only as far as you yourself have gone …
Richard Rohr, in The Naked Now
+ + +
Richard Rohr writes of two monks of the 11th and 12th century – Hugh of St. Victor monastery in Paris, France, and Richard of the same monastery. He tells us that these monks wrote that humans have been given three different ways of seeing. One way arises from the eyes that produce thoughts. The second way of seeing leads to reason, and to reflection and meditation. The third way of seeing leads to true understanding and contemplation.
It is the third way of seeing that is the rarest and most evolved. Whereas the first way of seeing is common, it produces little depth of experience, is more concrete and binds one to the immediate without nuance. The second way of seeing allows one to relish his or her power to conceive of the material disposition of the world. Ah, but the third way of seeing allows one to do more – it allows one to “taste” existence, to be in awe before the underlying mystery, coherence, and spaciousness that connects one with everything!
The third way of seeing is seeing as a mystic sees – seeing as God has designed us to see. This seeing exceeds the senses, does not rest on knowledge and intellect alone – but rather sees in a manner that expands his or her consciousness – and in this is transformed, made whole, lives in and above at the same time, is mortal and immortal, contented, whole and wise in ways that neither the senses nor intellect can offer.
In commenting on this Rohr says “I cannot emphasize strongly enough that the separation and loss of these three necessary eyes is at the basis of much of the short-sight-edness and religious crises in the Western world.” Hence the above quote that leads into today’s blog.
The view that Rohr shares, Dear Friends, highlights how and why “identity politics” is so destructive, so wrong-headed, so primitive, tribal, hostile, aggressive, hateful and unappetizing. Those with greater depth of human experience cannot abide that which pits one against another in a death struggle. We are, after all, not made to be enemies to one another but rather brothers and sisters to one another.
This historic moment requires us to see as the mystic sees.
Shalom.
Reclining at table with his disciples, Jesus was deeply troubled and testified, “Amen, amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me.”
John 13:21
+ + +
Betrayal. It is hard to imagine anything more disillusioning than violating a relationship.
Think about it, one has a trusted relationship and violates that trust. You can see it in a man who fathers a child but deserts his child and the woman with whom he fathered the child.
Imagine Judas who was mentored by Jesus. Think of what he did. He sat at the table with Jesus and his disciples and took his morsel given at the table and walked away … from Light to Darkness – that is betrayal. Judas choose alienation over sacred loyalty, over friendship, over duty and obligation, over faith, over honesty, over trust, evil over good, his own desires over God.
And then there is Peter. Pledging his loyalty to Jesus, he denied knowing Our Lord three times before the cock would crow. Yes, cowardice got the best of Peter. Yes, for Peter fear dominated faith. Yes, Peter, too, choose alienation. Yes, for Peter trust was abandoned, friendship was dishonored – God denied.
Look about you today. Are we a culture of trust? Or is betrayal more common?
Are we a culture of heroes or betrayers? One in which citizen is alienated from citizen? A culture of unity or division? Is division commonplace? Is it the way of a political party? Do women create division from men? Do father’s desert their children? Men and women divorce one another with ease?
Alienation. Betrayal. Distrust. Hero or coward? Loyal or not? Divisive or unifying? Neighbor or not? Friend or enemy? One alone or many together? God-full or Godless?
Shalom.
3:03 a.m. – how nice it is to awake in the full night of silence to think about faith
# # #
Faith is a backward-looking virtue. It concerns who we are … “the mystical chords of memory.”
Deirdre N. McCloskey, in The Bourgeois Virtues
+ + +
In faith you are connected with those who have come before you – with a stream of being that reaches to the very distant past, the sacrifice of others, their fidelity. Their story is our story.
In faith we belong to others – to Saint Peter and Saint John – to Abraham and Martha and Mary and Lazarus … to Aquinas, St. Augustine, to Simon of Cyrene, the men on the road to Emmaus – to centuries of faithful Jews and Christians.
In faith we have identity … a place in a long story that has no end.
In a world too often focused on the immediate, the immaterial, on desire, immersed in anxiety, loneliness, doubt and worry – we have in faith: certainty, confidence, cause, connection, and a call to life.
In faith we have as Aristotle says “another self,” – in faith is solidarity and union with one another now, in the past and in what is to come. In faith we know love – a love that runs to what has come before, what is now, and what will be in all the tomorrows yet to come.
In faith, particular differences do not matter for the faith others possess is the faith we possess. Ethnicity, race, age, social status, wealth and such do not matter to those who share a faith.
The broad identity of faith is the union of belief. We are, in faith, what we believe. Therein is our solace, our identity, our purpose, our meaning, our stability and our happiness.
Shalom.
In our time we should emphasize what unites rather than what divides.
Pope John XXIII
+ + +
These are the words of Pope John XXIII on his death-bed. I cite them today because they fit so well the circumstances we face now.
There is great division in this land. It seems as if people desire that we be divided, fragmented, at odds with one another … divided and separated from God and faith, self and one another. Today hostility is heightened and friendship diminished.
This brings me to my long-term concern with how one lives one’s faith in a secular culture – now that one is apt to be estranged from spiritual existence in a culture that manifests so much discontent, anger and self-destruction.
My own course has been an attempt to understand both God and culture. To look at our history as a nation and Western Civilization, to see the challenges we face, review our failures and our successes, look closely at our psychological health and development and our nature as spiritual beings.
It follows that my reading encompasses history, philosophy, psychology, theology, mythology, literature and the like. But my inquiry has also experienced and thought about monastics and their ability to live faith and grow spiritually and as healthy humans notwithstanding the shape of the world over many centuries.
What I have come to understand is this: (1) if you wish to live your faith and do so deeply, you need to know how a culture can deter you from faith and your spiritual development, and (2) in seeking to live your faith in a secularized culture, you would be wise to learn from the monastic experience for it has over many years allowed men and women to grow spiritually and in contentment through their separation from the culture at-large, their silence, solitude, study and simple life style.
I might add that if you wish to assist others in finding faith in secular culture it becomes necessary to identify those things in culture which make a healthy spiritual existence quite difficult and those things which incline to foreclose one’s spiritual development and ultimate peace and contentment that daily living of one’s faith allows.
In short, what I am saying is this – to live faith in secular culture – you do well to take an informed assessment of the culture, become familiar with the nature of monastic existence and make use of its framework so you might exist within a secular culture while living fully in your faith. Yes, in this you will be living at an arm’s length or more from the present culture as it is endlessly extended to you in a mass communication and the highly visualized and extensively noisy storm of images and words.
In practical terms it is wise to adopt a monastic disposition in an intrusive secularized culture.
Shalom.
Postscript – In the 1950’s we held the Communists in check when they invaded Korea, would we do less in facing them in our own country?
Tradition consists not only of handling down the dogmatic formulas and liturgical customs from one generation to the next. It means receiving this traditional teaching into ourselves in such a way that it becomes part of us. It must pass through our minds and hearts, become our own, and emerge in our lives as a true revelation of Christ here and now. It is only then that our baptism and the other sacraments achieve their purpose of extending Christ’s presence throughout time and space. Christians are meant to be the continuing revelation of God’s Son through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit who dwells within us. (Emphasis added.)
Thomas Keating, in The Heart of the World
+ + +
Our faith is meant to be experienced. To be ingested. Consumed. And employed as the central understanding that governs us, in which all that is encountered is (as a consequence) received and understood.
Yes, we are to live to extend Christ in the present. Is there any doubt that this culture, this nation top to bottom needs Christ today. That our leadership needs Christ, our public discourse needs Christ today? No. None. Nor is there any doubt that each of us is intended to be as Christ would have us be.
Our very being is centered on the reality of God, of Christ. Recall our God says, “I am who am.” God as being in us and in all others and things.
Live your Christian faith – openly, vocally, daily, and fortify all those among you who do.
Shalom.
Shalom.
“How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action?”
Arthur Schopenhauer, in On the Foundations of Morality
+ + +
This is precisely the kind of question that is not asked by individuals in America today. It is precisely the sort of question in which we are of a very desperate need.
Its absence is the product of our failed education system – especially university education and makes its absence in a secular culture that denies God in favor of “trivial pursuits.”
Yes, what we concentrate on does not seek the feel and understanding of the mystery that this implicit in this question and others of its ilk.
I give you one such distraction that is our preoccupation. It is “equality.”
Who images any one person is in every measure the equal of another in very detail? No one who is thinking. Yet, we chase in all sorts of “social justice” pursuits “equality.” Likewise such a notion allows us to divide in hostility one from another. Such estrangement does great damage – separating us woman from man, and by race, religion and income.
Yet over all these separations and distractions – one stops to help another who suffers. One risks one’s life for another. We do this because we are who God made us to be in the doing of such things.
In contrast, the political climate separates us and with God in exile we grow further apart and weaker as people and as a nation.
My constant frustration is this: I see hardly anyone in public life who lives as if they ever ponder as Schopenhauer’s inquiry so clearly does.
We ought to be ashamed and less a pack of complainers and more individuals with interest in the defining questions of life that make us far better people and a stronger and more faithful nation.
Shalom.
Spirlaw 