[Oe List ...] 7/28/2022, Progressing Spirit: Kevin G. Thew Forrester: Christ Heart: Living With Holy Mystery - Part 2; Spong revisited

Thu Jul 28 07:28:12 PDT 2022

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Christ Heart: Living With Holy Mystery - Part 2
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|  Essay by Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
July 28, 2022In discovering Holy Mystery, we are not finding some thing, but realizing the truth about our nature. This discovery is more than a passing experience, but it does flow from an actual experience of being touched by the grace of love in an ordinary encounter. What arises from the experience, marking it as a discovery, is that consciousness is transformed.

We are becoming aware of what we are: Boundless love is the Source of life and the longing of the soul. As we live from the Source, we become more curious about life, which means we question, ceaselessly. The questions arise from the desire to know Holy Mystery more fully. But Holy Mystery is an inexhaustive reality; the Deep that speaks with our own Deep and draws us forward and inward in curiosity about the nature of the soul. There is always more for the heart to know because the Beloved is boundless. Intimacy is infinite.

Once the heart discovers Holy Mystery, the spiritual journey commences in earnest. Consciousness begins to awaken. Discovery, though sweet, draws us forward to taste more. We have stumbled, in part, upon the soul’s treasure. If we are steadfast and find a spiritual guide, discovery can mature into learning to live with Holy Mystery.

The object we have sought as our salvation (as some one or some thing or some teaching or some doctrine or some belief or some ritual), we realize, is not out there but resides in our heart. True, the object is not some ordinary thing, but our own true nature, but this is at first a quite faint awareness. We continue for some time to experience a distance between our heart and its intimate treasure of the Beloved. There is still an object relation, even if it be I and Thou.

Living with Holy Mystery is the spiritual schooling of the soul. Soulful awakening is an embodied awakening. Learning to live with Holy Mystery is applying all our will to creating a way of life that supports, nurtures, and expresses, the boundless love that is our true nature.

The personality is characterized by habitual perceptions, preferences, dislikes, defenses, aversions, and passions. The ordinary self is the result of habitual reactions relatively consistent over decades. If the Discovery of Holy Mystery is to mature into a Living with Holy Mystery, then we will need to develop new soulful practices that nurture maturation.

This spiritual path is a journey of love; a journey of learning the practices, the ways, and the language, of love. It is so easy for spirituality to become lost in the maze of extraordinary experiences, or states, or esoteric knowledge. All of this can be quite seductive.

Living with Holy Mystery is much simpler and simultaneously asks much more of us. We are being invited to trust so that the grip which fear has on the heart might begin to loosen and release. We are being asked to learn to let go, but the letting go only comes as we understand the power and place of fear in our life. Acknowledging and feeling fear will create the space within for courageous trust to arise.

In the wise and straightforward words of the Buddhist teacher, Jack Kornfield, I am describing a Christian spiritual path which is a path with heart.  Even more, we are exploring the spiritual path of Christ Heart as a path of heart.

Living with Holy Mystery is the painful and courageous journey of realizing how to be a being of trust, and in turn becoming a being who can relax, enjoy, and be erotically creative. A heart at rest is a heart from which spontaneous creativity can flow, and this flow is known as eros. Holy Mystery is an erotic spontaneous unfolding of heart.

But how do we learn to live with Holy Mystery? We have welcomed a new lover, and they are a stranger in so many ways.

We begin with commitment. We reprioritize daily life, often gradually at first, remaining within our window of toleration so we don’t bolt from feeling overwhelmed. We place our love, our dear one, at the center.

The etymology of commitment is to entrust. We are handing over the keys to our heart to our lover. We are welcoming our lover into all dimensions of our life. This Beloved is not a weekend tryst or a passing fancy. We are consciously choosing to reorient our life so that the Beloved remains present. When we arise in the morning the Beloved is there. When we lay down to sleep, their heart lies upon ours.

Living with our lover takes practice. Not perfection!! Practice. We need practices that engage heart, mind, and body. Holy Mystery is a Beloved ready to receive all of us, not just pieces or parts.  Through diligent practice habits – the engrained reactiveness of our habitual self – can begin dissolving.

The spiritual path requires core practices capable of reforming our life. These are the practices of meditation; spiritual exploration; breath, body, and movement; and liturgy. There are others. But these ancient wisdom practices can develop the capacity of the heart to be a lover. Through them, we discover our inherent beauty, innate goodness, erotic power, boundless curiosity, primordial unity with creation, and the infinite capacity of the heart to love because the heart’s true nature is love.

Meditation. The spiritual path of Awakening as Holy Mystery is not primarily a meditative path, but a path of awakening in which meditation is integral. This distinguishes the realization of Christ Heart from Buddhism or other spiritual traditions in which meditation is the principal practice. Meditation has a central place in awakening as Holy Mystery. It is pivotal to awakening the heart from its slumber. To be effective, meditation must be consistent, sincere, and practiced with skill. We need a realized teacher as a guide. There are many kinds of meditation. The key is to find that practice that works for you. Be willing to explore several forms and trust your heart. But settle on a meditation and stick with it as a daily practice. Meditation teaches how to be with life as it arises. Meditation teaches how to see and let pass the many thoughts and feelings and sensations that arise. Meditation teaches the mind, heart, and body to settle and become grounded. We learn not to run, nor to advance, but to receive – which is to trust Reality.

Spiritual Exploration. Human beings are naturally curious, but it is a curiosity dampened by fear. Spiritual exploration is rekindling the heart’s natural desire to ask questions. In spiritual exploration we read, we reflect, we journal, and we gather with others to explore. We mature through inquiry and conversation. We are discovering a fundamental truth about Reality: there is never a final answer because there is never a final question. We question because we realize that Reality is a lover that enjoys being intimately explored. Intimacy is infinite.

Breath, Body, Movement. The spiritual teacher, Gurdjieff, describes most human beings as having become mechanical. Decades of habitual reactivity results in becoming numb to inner life and acting stiffly and routinely without spontaneous connection with heart and body. Hence, his own work integrated movement and dance. Developing a regular practice of breath, body, and movement is integral to awakening as Christ Heart. Diamond Body Work is one such practice that I’ve found to be quite valuable. Christianity speaks about incarnation but has forgotten much of its practical wisdom about the body, the breath, and movement. Tai Chi, Reiki, and Dances of Universal Peace are some of the wonderful practices that can develop the erotic sense of breath, body, and movement.

Liturgy (Community). Liturgy implies community. The ancient language is that we are the body of Christ. The we, however, includes more than human beings. Reality is the body of Christ. In liturgy, we offer creative ritual expression about the truth of what we are and what we are experiencing in this moment as the body. In liturgy we are living with Holy Mystery embodied as ritual – embodied in our loss, in our dreams, in our loves, in our hopes, in our anger, in our bewilderment, in our desolation, in our longing. There is no end to the shape ritual may take as the expression of the community’s heart in the moment. Liturgy sustains, nurtures, teaches, and encourages us to continue maturing into our living as Holy Mystery.

To discover and live with Holy Mystery is to appreciate the unity of all creatures because all creatures are living words of Being. Learning to live with Holy Mystery is also a deepening of compassion and love for all that is; a life of restorative justice. Our compassion is not because of an imposed command but because the heart recognizes and responds to the inherent beauty and goodness of creation. Living with Holy Mystery engages us fully in the unfolding of life. Any suffering is everyone’s suffering and evokes a response to restore wholeness as best we can.  Living with Holy Mystery is loving the infinite beauty of creation and responding with lives that are restorative in word and touch.

Living with Holy Mystery moves the heart to wonder and question whether the union it knows can deepen still further.~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.

Read online here

About the Author
Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D. is an Episcopal priest, a student of the Diamond Approach for over a decade, as well as a certified teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. He is the founder of the Healing Arts Center of  in Marquette, Michigan, and the author of five books, including I Have Called You Friends, Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms, and My Heart is a Raging Volcano of Love for You and Beyond my Wants, Beyond my Fears: The Soul’s Journey into the Heartland. Visit Kevin’s Blog: Essential Living: For The Soul’s Journey.  |

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Question & Answer

Q: By Larry

As a scientist, more damaging elements have taken place in volcanic eruptions than all the fuel driven vehicles created since time began. Mt. St. Helens is a prime example, yet, the climate change advocates blame fossil fuels as the main culprit for earth’s “uncleanliness”.  I totally disagree. I am a total advocate of continually trying to cleanse the planet, but earth does this over time (eons, perhaps). Is this merely a political ploy to advantage those whose knowledge is affixed to an agenda? 

A: By Rev. Jim BurkloDear Larry,Thanks for this important question! 

As you, a scientist, must know, the primary cause of catastrophic climate change today isn’t debatable.  It’s us, with our disastrously high levels of CO2 and methane emissions.  We have the power to prevent the worst of this collapse, so we must do so.  The scientific consensus about it is overwhelming.  Other than respect for the science itself, and a desire to protect humankind and the ecosystem from collapse, I can think of no other “agenda” behind it. 

This consensus is old news.

In 1970, in high school, I learned from our biology teacher about the “greenhouse effect” of CO2 emissions dangerously warming the planet.  At the age of 16, I was appointed to the federal Student Council on Pollution and the Environment, through which, with a small group of other students, I got to meet the Secretary of the Interior, an affable Republican named Wally Hickel.  I asked him this question:  “Shouldn’t we be taxing oil and gas at a high rate in order to reduce emissions of CO2 that are heating up the planet?”  His answer:  “Young man, what you are saying is true.  But your solution is politically impossible.”  I was happy that he recognized the fact of the climate threat.  But I was appalled that he had no intention of making it politically possible to address it.  For over fifty years since, cowardly politicians have had their way with this issue.  And now, many of them have the audacity to deny the existence of the problem altogether.  Wally Hickel would be “cancelled” out of the Republican Party today!  And now we’re living with the terrible consequences of this denial. 

You are right that a series of volcanic eruptions could upend the earth’s climate, as has happened in the past.  But how does that take us off the hook for dealing with our greenhouse gas emissions today?  With billions of human beings now occupying this earth, I’m sure you’d agree that if mega-eruptions from volcanoes were imminent, and we had technology available to prevent them, we’d be obliged to use it.  That’s exactly where we are now, with climate disaster literally breathing down our necks.  We have the capacity to greatly curtail greenhouse gas emissions.  The moral imperative for decisive action is undeniable.~ Rev. Jim Burklo

Read and share online here

About the Author
Rev. Jim Burklo is the Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California.  An ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, he is the author of seven published books on progressive Christianity, his latest book is Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus (St Johann Press, 2021).  His weekly blog, “Musings”, has a global readership.  He serves on the board of ProgressiveChristiansUniting.org and is an honorary advisor and frequent content contributor for ProgressiveChristianity.org.   |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

"Think Different–Accept Uncertainty" Part XIX:
The Dawning of Resurrection

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
October 18, 2012Behind the narratives of Easter contained in the gospel tradition was an experience that was undeniable, powerful and true to the followers of Jesus.  That experience exploded upon them in a manner that words could not capture, but it left its mark on them in indelible ways.  Because of whatever that experience was their lives were changed from being fearful people in hiding to being heroic people willing to die for the reality of their new vision.  That experience transformed the way they envisioned God so dramatically that the person of Jesus was incorporated into their understanding of God.  That experience caused them to create a new holy day, the first day of the week, as a time to recall and commemorate the transforming experience they had undergone.Whatever this experience was it occurred around they year 30 C.E.  The gospels were not written for two to three generations after that time or somewhere between 70-100 C.E.  By the time the gospels came to be written, the experience had been explained, told and retold, countless numbers of times and it had evolved into a kind of creedal or liturgical formula.  The formula had several elements, responding to the inevitable human questions: “who, where, when and how.”  The phrase “three days” became part of the liturgy not, I suspect, because it was three days after the crucifixion that they had the experience of resurrection, but because the Christians gathered on the first day of the week to celebrate the meaning of Jesus and the first day of the week was the third day after the Friday on which the crucifixion was remembered.  So three days became the symbol, not the measure of the time between the first Good Friday and the first Easter celebration.We have to explore the texts of the various gospels that I outlined last week in order to answer these four questions.  Who was it who stood in the center of whatever the Easter experience was and who then opened the eyes of the others to see what he had seen?  There is no question, but that the gospels portray Simon, who was nicknamed Peter, as the one who was central in this story.  That is why he is always listed first among the disciples.  He was said to have been the first one to confess that Jesus was the Christ at a place named Caesarea Philippi.  He was the one to whom Jesus was quoted as saying, “Peter, when you are converted, strengthen the brethren.”  He was the one to whom the Christ of the Fourth Gospel was quoted as saying: “Peter, will you also go away?” and Peter responded, “Lord, to whom shall I go?  You have the words of eternal life!”In the biblical sources that purport to relate the resurrection tradition, Paul says the risen Christ “appeared first to Cephas,” that is to Peter.  Mark has the messenger say to the women at the tomb: “Go tell the disciples and Peter,” that he has been raised.  In Luke, the disciples interrupt Cleopas to tell him that the risen Christ has appeared to Peter thus relegating Cleopas’ vision to a secondary position.  In the Epilogue to John’s gospel, Peter is the star as he is reconstituted into the band of disciples after being the one who denied and who was then commissioned to feed the sheep of God.  Peter appears to be the primary person in whom the resurrection experience dawned, that is, the first one to perceive its meaning.Where were the disciples when this experience called resurrection occurred in a particular individual or in their collective minds?  That is, where were they when their lives were transformed?  The earliest gospel tradition asserts that it was in Galilee.  That was their home.  That is where the messenger in Mark asserts that they will see him.  Even Paul hints at the originality of the experience of resurrection being located in Galilee.  Matthew says that the only time the disciples saw the raised and glorified Jesus was in Galilee on top of a mountain.  In the Epilogue to the Fourth Gospel, a very primitive resurrection tradition is recorded as occurring in Galilee, where they had returned to the fishing trade after Jesus’ crucifixion.  On the other hand both Luke and John assert a primary Jerusalem setting for the resurrection experience, denying the Galilean location totally.  Everything about these Jerusalem appearances, however, looks contrived and developed, while the Galilee stories look fresh and original.  Only in the Jerusalem setting do you have appearances details and physical symbols, while the Galilean stories are vague and less defined, even mysterious. So the consensus of opinion is that Peter stood in the center of whatever the resurrection experience was and that he opened the eyes of the others to see what he had seen and that this occurred when they had returned to Galilee some time after the crucifixion.These are the details then that force us to answer the “when” question by suggesting that three days was a symbol and not a measure of time.  It would have taken the disciples seven to ten days to return to Galilee from Jerusalem after the crucifixion so nothing could literally have occurred inside the three day interval that came to separate resurrection from crucifixion.  Luke suggests that appearances of the raised Christ continued for 40 days.  The main body of John’s gospel relegates the resurrection experience to two special days separated by one week.  The Epilogue to the Fourth Gospel seems to indicate that months had passed before the disciples confronted his risen presence by the Sea of Galilee.  If we dispense with literalizing the three day symbol, we open the possibility that whatever Easter was, it might have occurred months after the crucifixion – perhaps up to as long as a year.So, Peter is the central person, Galilee is the primary place and the time is perhaps months to a year after the crucifixion before the resurrection dawns as a life-changing experience.  How then did it dawn?  What was the context?  I am convinced that it had nothing to do with a resuscitated body walking out of a tomb.  It had to do, rather, with a new vision of life, a new consciousness, a new understanding of reality.  It had to do with seeing the death of Jesus as a new freedom, a life no longer bound by the primeval drive to survive, a life free to give itself away and even to love those who took his life from him.  That was something new, something transformative, something none of them had ever known before.  A life free of the drive to survive is victorious over death.  A life free to give itself away, free to love, not to avenge those who were his killers, represented a new dimension of what humanity can become and can be.In the evolutionary development of the universe, birth began in the “Big Bang” some 13.7 to 13.8 billion years ago in a burst of material energy.  Only physical matter existed in this universe for about nine billion years before life emerged out of this expanding matter.  This life was in the form of primitive single cells, but it had the life capacity to reproduce itself that physical matter had never before possessed.  After hundreds of millions of years, this thing called life first began to cluster making complexity in life real.  Then this thing called life split itself into two streams, one of which was animate and the other inanimate life.  Next, in the flow of what seemed like an infinite amount of time, out of the animate side of life, primitive forms of consciousness appeared.  Again, over hundreds of millions of years, that new gift of consciousness grew and expanded.  A dog is far more conscious than a clam, for example.  Finally, perhaps no more than 250,000 years ago out of developed consciousness, self-consciousness appeared and with it the ability to say “I” and “me;” the ability to recall the past and to anticipate the future; the awareness that we are both driven and limited by our own desire to survive, which locks us as self-conscious people into a pattern of self-centeredness.  That was called by some “human nature,” but by others “original sin,” which assumed that this was a matter of choice and not the nature of life itself.It is that definition of “human nature” that gave way in the life of Jesus.  He somehow moved beyond the drive to survive and thus revealed a new kind of human life.  He moved from self-consciousness into a universal consciousness where he shed all of the limitations that marked humanity.  He had become part of that which we call God, but defined in a multiplicity of ways as we seek to embrace the unlimited reality beyond all the boundaries of humanity. Mortality and death have no power over this dimension of humanity. When one is not bound by the drive to survive, one enters into a new understanding of what it means to be human.  One is free to live, free to love and free to be.  That is what people experienced in what they came to call the resurrection.  This insight dawned after the crucifixion when they broke bread, which they identified with Jesus’ broken body and drank wine, which they identified with his shed blood.  Thus they “remembered the Lord’s death until he came again.” The “second coming” was not a return of the human Jesus to the world at the end of time.  It was the freeing gift of the spirit that called and invited human beings to step beyond life’s limits and into a new consciousness.  So the gospel witness was that the risen Christ “was known to us in the breaking of the bread.”Human language can only point to the reality of this truth.  It cannot capture it.  That is why the story of the resurrection of Jesus inevitably got literalized into a grave that was empty, apparitions that appeared and a body that was resuscitated.  Behind these literal images is one over whom death had no power. On that truth Christianity stands today and will live into the future.  To understand it, however, we must “think different” and “accept uncertainty.”~  John Shelby Spong  |

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