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Christianity as a Nondual Spiritual Path

Essay by Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
April 5, 2018

I am who I am. (Ex.3.14)

…our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee. (Augustine, Confessions)

God’s ground is my ground, and my ground is God’s ground. (Eckhart)

As Moses climbs the mountain, he arrives at his soul’s summit out of breath, bone-weary, and hungry; hungry to know the truth of what it is he searches for. He is an embodiment of humanity’s search for the truth of its Being. Lungs burning and on fire from the exertion, he is bent over in exhaustion and gasping for air to fill his body and satisfy his pounding heart. Alone on the mountain he breathes and breathes and breathes. Slowly the awareness begins to arise – not from above and not from out of the blue – but from within his own hungry breathing and pulsating body; with each breath in and with each breath out, consciousness clears and ever so gradually perceives what is fundamentally true about him: I am who I am. I am – he breaths in, who I am – he breaths out. Over and again. Each breath is new, and yet each reveals the same abiding truth: I am – he breaths in, who I am – he breaths out.

In and through Moses we have perhaps the most pivotal Jewish experience, and thus revelation, in the Hebrew scriptures. The name of the ground of reality, which is the name of God and the name of Moses (which means your name and my name), is I am who I am. In this primordial human experience is the realization of no separation, no boundary. Being is the boundless ocean from which all arises. These deep waters are the font from which flows forth the nondual spiritual path within Christianity.

Over the past year in my columns I have repeatedly spoken about the boundless nature of Being – particularly the quality of boundless love. The significance of the quality of boundlessness is that Being by its very nature is without division or separation. To be sure, there are infinite distinctions within Being, but no separation. The primordial waters give rise to an infinite variety of waves, but each and every ripple embodies and expresses the boundless ocean. Such is the nature of grace.

I am aware that nonduality is not a term original to Jewish, Christian, or Muslim spirituality. However, nonduality captures beautifully and accurately the abiding truth of which I’m speaking and of which Eckhart spoke when he declared without ambiguity that God’s ground is my ground, and my ground is God’s ground. Eckhart searched within the budding German vocabulary he himself was helping to create to give adequate voice to mystical experience. (Not only his experience but that of Marguerite Porete and of the mystical Beguines.) Beyond God, he said, was the Godhead, that mystery into which all disappears and from which all that is flows. Godhead was Eckhart’s way of trying to describe the mystery of boundless oceanic Being that is indivisible and from which all spontaneously arises moment-to-moment.

The importance of realizing Christianity as a nondual spiritual path is that it frees our souls to continue their natural maturation in Spirit by honoring, attending to, and coming to understand the actual experiences of this life. We can slowly begin to realize that the essential qualities we long to experience – such as compassion, strength, peace – are of the very fabric of our Being. Perhaps above all, we can discover the freedom of being alone as Being because we no longer search out there for something else to save us from our true selves. We are always already of Being.

Our longing, therefore, is even deeper than that expressed in the heartful cry of Augustine. For with Augustine, God, however beautiful and potentially satisfying, remains an “object” of desire. It really doesn’t matter if the object be far or near, it is still an object. For Augustine, and much of the west that lives and thinks in the wake of his theology, God remains a holy object not only distinct from, but separate from, us and all creation. Creator and creation remain essentially different, disparate, realities.

But the soul’s longing is for the most intimate truth of who she essentially is: Being is her essence, her ground, her reality. She and the mystery of Being are one, not two. She longs to perceive this truth of her own Being immediately and directly. She is a wave – beautiful and unrepeatable – of the one Ocean. She is grace. This experience wherein we taste the truth of our origin and of our nature – which is the experience of Moses on the mountain – alone satisfies the hungry heart (which is another way to speak of the soul) and is the true meaning of faith. Faith is our personal and direct experience of what is really real. Faith is our taste of the water of Being that is life itself. Faith then draws the soul forth in growth to realize ever more fully in her life – in all that she does – this essential truth of who she is.

This means that a nondual Christianity is a transtheistic Christianity, which is to say a Christianity able to embrace and transcend conventional theism. There is no need to discard or devalue. But there is a need to perceive truly and fully. Christianity’s own origin contains an evolutionary thrust propelling it beyond theism, beyond a god who is an object. When the Jesus of John’s gospel exclaims that I and the Father are one, this is an epiphany of the heart. The heart of Jesus and the heart of Being are of one Ground, one Reality. Jesus is a beautiful Jewish wave of the ocean of Being. But the gospel of Thomas pleads with us to realize that what is true of Jesus is true of every human being. The realization of the truth of who we are by its nature dissolves god as an object of belief. We begin to realize that the very term God – if it is to be invoked at all – is best understood and utilized as a poetic way for speaking of the boundlessly gracious quality, which is to say the loving giftedness, of the very fabric of life.

Christianity as a nondual spiritual path has far reaching ramifications. Let me briefly note one. For liturgical Christian traditions, such as my own, a period such as Lent is transformed into a season of transfiguration much like that enjoined by the nondual mystics (or hesychasts) of the Orthodox tradition. We are all too often held in bondage (Exodus) by our belief in a god who is other – held hostage in our ritual, our prayer, our song. Lent can be a season of spiritual purification, which has nothing to do with morality, but with soulful clarification. Eckhart implores us to let go of all our concepts and language about God because they become fixations and idols of the mind. In the language of Buddhism, we get lost in the land of forms. Within a nondual Christian spirituality, Lent becomes a seasonal reminder calling us to return to the liquid land of our soul; a land flowing easily upon the river’s breath of the truth that I am who I am.

~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.

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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 St. Paul’s Church 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“.

Question & Answer

Q: By Clifford from the internet:

Has the latest telescopic view of the universe (universes?) had any effect on liberal thinking concepts of a creator, intelligent design OR ESPECIALLY on the capability of the human species to really understand its source? Are we attempting a task greater than our human intelligence is capable of?

A: By Rev. Matthew Fox

Dear Clifford,

There was a time when cosmology or creation was at the very heart of healthy religion and spirituality. Genesis itself begins not with the human condition but with the universe—an Original Blessing indeed! The Wisdom tradition, from which the historical Jesus springs, celebrates God in nature. Pre-modern thinkers like Thomas Aquinas said: “Revelation comes in two volumes: Nature and the Bible” and “the most excellent thing in the universe is not the human but the universe itself.” Meister Eckhart said: “Every creature is a word of God and a book about God.”

What happened to this theological interest in the universe? Well, the Black Death in the fourteenth century scared people into thinking nature (and God) were out to get us. And the “neurotic question” (Biblical scholar Krister Stendahl’s language) “Am I saved?” held sway. So Redemption and Salvation swamped Creation as a prime interest in the Reformation and at the dawn of the modern age. The burning of Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600 and the imprisonment of Galileo did not help much either.

So religion pretty much went its way in pursuit of “souls” and anthropocentrism while science went its way in pursuit of truths about the universe. A schizophrenic civilization was the sad result. But today is another day. Today many scientists agree that science and spirituality need each other and as for theology, Pere Chenu, my mentor, named the Creation Spirituality tradition that has been my life’s work. Aquinas devoted his life to bringing the scientist Aristotle into the faith tradition. “A mistake about creation results in a mistake about God” Aquinas warned.

Of course we cannot do theology without science. When we try we get silliness such as people championing homophobia while ignoring what science tells us about gay and lesbian populations just like the church ignored Galileo’s findings centuries ago. Science feeds us with the awe of creation. What about the fact uncovered two summers ago that our universe is two trillion galaxies large? Doesn’t that reignite our wonder at being here? And since “ecology is functional cosmology” (Berry), surely our entire ecological crisis looms in great part because religion has failed in its responsibility to announce the sacredness of creation.

In my book on Evil called Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society, the first three chapters are about the sacredness of the Universe Flesh; the Eco flesh; and Human Flesh drawn from today’s scientific findings. Only in the context of wonder and awe ought we to be talking about spirituality or theology or Evil.

The Cosmic Christ archetype offers a profound awareness about the cosmos that was alive in the earliest Christian Scriptures including Paul and the Gospel of Thomas.(1) One reason seminaries are dying is that they have Biblical scholars but no scientists on the faculty telling of the wonders of creation.
So, YES! OF COURSE cosmos and psyche must reunite and the sooner the better. Aquinas said “every human person is capax universi, capable of the universe.” And what a universe it is! He invokes the psalmist who writes we are to get “drunk on God’s house” and Aquinas comments, “that is, the universe.”

~ Rev. Matthew Fox

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About the Author

Rev. Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 32 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 69 languages. Fox has devoted 45 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship. His work is inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and has awakened millions to the much neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. He has helped to rediscover Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas. Among his books are Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh, Transforming Evil in Soul and Society, A Way To God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey, Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times and Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest

A new school, adopting the pedagogy Fox created and practiced for over 35 years, is opening in Boulder, Colorado this September. Called the Fox Institute for Creation Spirituality it is being run by graduates of his doctoral program and will offer MA, D Min and Doctor of Spirituality degrees. With young leaders he is launching a new spiritual (not religious) "order" called the Order of the Sacred Earth (OSE) that is welcoming to people of all faith traditions and none and whose 'glue' is a common vow: "I promise to be the best lover of Mother Earth and the best defender of Mother Earth that I can be."

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(1) See my The Coming of the Cosmic Christ and my and Bishop Marc Andrus’ Stations of the Cosmic Christ.

Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Whose Money Is It? A Meditation on April 15th

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on April 20, 2005

“I am very much in favor of our youngest workers having the ability to set aside a small portion of their own money to invest in a personal account that will build equity for them and a sense of ownership in America.” These were the words of President Bush at a press conference in March of 2005 as he sought support for his proposed plan to reform Social Security.

April 15 each year is the due date for tax payments to the Federal and State Governments based on the previous year’s income. We have just gone through it. It is a day dreaded by many, looked forward to by few. Taxation is the place where citizens feel the burden of citizenship. In listening to political figures, however, one gets the impression that some of them believe that no one ought to pay any taxes. It is certainly politically popular to lower rather than to raise taxes. This nation, guided by this mentality, has moved significantly to lessen that burden in recent years. The tax rates on dividends and capital gains have both been cut substantially. The percentage of the total amount of all taxes collected from the wealthiest citizens of this nation has decreased notably in the last 50 years. The amount of inheritance tax due upon the death of those citizens, whose wealth is in the tens of millions, is on a schedule to be phased out completely over the next few years. These are popular strategies until the nation begins to understand that the quality of life is impaired when we move too far in that direction. As part of the campaign for tax cuts the claim is always made that the money collected in taxes is really ‘your own money.’ The government is therefore guilty of ‘confiscating’ your property. It is an interesting argument. It sounds fair to allow those whose money it is to retain more of it. No one seems to notice or perhaps to care that while these wonderful tax breaks have been received, the budget deficit of this country has risen to an all time high and is growing daily. That deficit does not yet include the cost of the Iraqi war, nor is there any amount included to offset the new deficit that will be established if private accounts are taken out of the Social Security system. It is in the juxtaposition of these realities that an enormous moral question must be raised. There is no better time to do it than while the April 15, 2005, tax due date is still fresh in our minds.

“Whose money is it?” Is there a claim that the whole society has a right to make on an individual’s wealth that is the legitimate basis for taxation? Where is the line to be drawn between private wealth and public good? Is it a patriotic act to avoid legitimate taxation by sending your corporate headquarters to Bermuda? Is there not a basic legitimacy for the payment of fair and equitable taxes on the part of every citizen? Do we not realize that America is still today the least taxed country in the developed world? Is it not also the nation with the highest percentage of people without health care? Are these things not related? Does it matter?

If we receive benefits for our tax dollars that none of us would be willing to sacrifice, then are not our taxes something we owe? Can it then be said to be ‘our money’? Do any of us want to live in a nation that has no parks for its citizens, that does not guarantee the quality of the water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat or the medicine we take? No citizen can provide these things for himself or herself and yet our individual lives are dependent on each of them. Do any of us want to live in a nation that has no federal or state roads, highways, bridges or tunnels over which or under which we may travel in our cars to pursue business or to see family and friends? Do any of us want to live in a nation that has no regulations governing airline security and no way to guarantee the safety of the planes on which we fly? Do we want to live in a nation that cannot secure its people from enemies, whether that be by providing our armed forces against those who might wish to harm us from abroad or by giving us adequate police and fire protection against people or events that might harm us internally. All of those things cost money but all of them are in my mind worth whatever they cost. Since our lives depend on our government to provide these basic services to us, are the taxes we are required to pay really ‘my’ money or do they represent the natural and normal cost required for our lives to be lived, a legitimate expense that guarantees to us a quality of life that we want and desire?

I, for one, do want our seniors or our parents who worked and saved all of their lives to have a government that will guarantee them a pension called Social Security, designed to provide them with a floor of security and dignity in the final years of their lives. I do want a government that will provide for me and for my family basic security from terrorists who seek to enter this nation. I do want a government that will guarantee the solvency of my savings in banks and the honesty of the financial industry that issues stocks and bonds. I do want a government that will certify that when the pump says I have received a gallon of gas that I have actually received a full gallon. I want a government that will support education, make it possible for my children to attend public schools and, if their ability allows it, to receive a university education at a cost that an average person can afford. I want a government that will encourage the unbounded human spirit to press new frontiers, to explore space, to fund the search to find cures for cancer, heart disease, diabetes and thousands of other diseases that snuff out life for many and affect the quality of life for all. I want the opportunity of choosing to live in this kind of world so should I not also expect to pay for it? Does that make my taxes, “my money?”

I believe that the taxes I pay in this country are the best bargain in my entire budget. I would not trade the benefits I receive in order to get back the taxes I pay and I think it is time for someone to say so publicly. Taxes are not “my money” that some alien government seeks to extort from one of its citizens. Taxes are the price I pay for the privilege of living in this land of freedom and opportunity. I treasure my citizenship in the United States. This does not mean that I am now, or have been in the past, supportive of every decision that a particular government of my nation might make. Individual political decisions are issues that I as a citizen can fight in the appropriate political arena. Some of those decisions are major, life-altering decisions. I think the decision not to provide health care for all is wrong. I grieve at the plight of the poor when illness strikes. I think Social Security should be fully funded not dismantled. Social Security, which was created only in 1935, kept my family afloat when my father died in 1943 and I was not 12 years old. He had paid into that fund for only eight years. Yet it supported my mother and her three young children when there was nothing else on which to depend. I also think that giving tax reductions to our wealthiest citizens while refusing to raise the minimum wage for our poorest citizens is quite simply immoral. I think the “contract with America” that removed many government restrictions that guaranteed the honesty of American business practices is what has given us the corruption found in the Enrons, the World Coms, the AIG’s, the Quests and the Health Souths of recent years. I think there are some things so basic to life that they ought to be federalized, not so that they are profitable but so that the citizens may be well served. Even when I list all of my complaints about the way this nation has been and is now being administered, even as I fight and lose on some of these issues, I still would not swap America for any other nation I know in the world. Since that is so I count it an incredible privilege to pay the taxes that I am required to pay to my city, to my state and to my federal government.

Patriotism takes many forms. To me it is far more than saluting the flag or observing the Fourth of July. It is more than supporting our troops who are deployed in faraway places. Patriotism means that I place the common good of my nation on a par with my assessment of my own personal good. It means that I rejoice in my annual opportunity on April 15 to do my part to keep my nation free and strong. It means that I must constantly recognize that my security has no meaning outside the security of my nation. My well-being has no meaning outside the well being of my country. Patriotism also means opposing a militaristic foreign policy that diminishes the reputation of my country among the nations of the world. Patriotism certainly does not mean seeking to destroy the common good in order to enhance my personal worth. That is why I am always amazed at the number of our citizens, who speak as super patriots, and yet who seem to believe that patriotism does not include the willingness to pay one’s share of a fair and equitable taxation program that makes it possible for this great nation to be what it is.

When I wrote my check to the Internal Revenue Service of the United States, I did so thinking of the great things that my taxes bring me. I did so as one still privileged to be critical of the political decisions of this particular government. I did so hopeful that a war in Iraq that I thought was not only disastrous but morally wrong, might still turn out to bring freedom to the Middle East, to allow a Palestinian state to be developed and may yet still guarantee the security of Israel for centuries to come. I wrote that check with the hope that politicians may yet come to understand that one does not gut the public good in order to give tax breaks to the wealthiest citizens. I did so with the conscious awareness that my taxes will inevitably have to be raised at some point in the not so far distant future to address the deficit and protect our nation’s financial competence in that future. When that day comes, the patriotic thing to do will be to vote to raise those taxes. Then we will see the difference between the patriots of conviction and the patriots of rhetoric. It costs money to live in the United States. I treasure that privilege so I willingly pay the price required. April 15th was my time to give thanks for the joy of citizenship in this land!

~ John Shelby Spong

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