Quote for the Day
Catholicism is the “one true church” only when it points beyond itself to the “one true Mystery,” and offers itself as the training ground for both human liberation and divine union.
— Richard Rohr, Falling Upward
Everything Has Being By the Love of God
Stained glass window of Julian of Norwich, Norwich Cathedral. Flickr image from Ian-S, under Creative Commons Licence. Used by permission.
In this same time our Lord showed me a spiritual sight of His homely loving.
I saw that He is to us everything that is good and comfortable for us: He is our clothing that for love wraps us, clasps us, and all encloses us for tender love, that He may never leave us; being to us everything that is good, as to my understanding.
He also showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought: “What may this be?” And it was answered generally thus: “It is all that is made.”
I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for how little it was. And I was answered in my understanding: “It lasts, and ever shall, because God loves it. And so everything has Being by the love of God.
In this little thing I saw three properties: first, that God made it, second, that God loves it, and third, that God keeps it. But what is truly the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover, I cannot tell; for until I am one with Him, I may never have full rest nor true bliss; that is to say, until I am so fastened to Him, that no created thing separates God from me.
— Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 5
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.
— John 15:9
When I was a boy, I’d love to go run errands with my father on a Saturday morning. It was a wonderful break from my normal routine, as well as a way to simply enjoy being with the man who often seemed distant simply because he, unlike my mother, worked outside the home. Dad would take me to the lumberyard, the hardware store, the fish market, or pretty much anywhere else he had business to conduct.
But one place I didn’t enjoy going to, even with him, was the city dump. Over forty years later, the overpowering smell of decaying refuse is still vividly imprinted in my imagination. The mud, the rust, the smell of burning tires: I suppose I determined at that young age that sanitation engineering was not a viable career choice for me.
When Julian of Norwich says that everything has being by the love of God, it’s easy to apply her words to the splendor of nature, or to gorgeous art, or to the joy embedded in a mother’s love or the romance of newlyweds. It’s easy to see God’s love in things that we intuitively call good or true or beautiful. But what about when things are out of kilter? What about the city dump, or an abandoned shopping center, or a neighborhood scarred by drug trafficking and gang activity? Where is the love of God in those corners of our world?
Julian never says that the love of God makes everything pretty or erases all evidence of sin or waste. The mystery that she speaks of is simply that all things — all things — emerge into being out of the love of God. Sometimes the love of God shines through more clearly than others. But it’s always there, for Divine love is the ground on which all existence, all reality, rests.
Julian recognizes that there is a foundational vulnerability to existence. When she receives a vision of the entire cosmos, small enough to appear like a hazelnut cradled in the palm of her hand, she wonders that it doesn’t simply “fall to naught.” In other words, it seems so vulnerable that its continued existence is a matter of question. I rather like to think that Julian saw, in that vision, an accurate model of the actual universe, shrunk down to hazelnut-size, which would mean that it appeared as little more than a shimmering ball of energy resting in her hand. No wonder it appeared as if it could at any moment cease to exist.
We all know how fragile life is. A car accident, a stroke, a heart attack — sometimes the thread separating life from death is thin indeed. Likewise, although we are often unwilling to admit it, the line separating what is beautiful from what isn’t, or what is good from what isn’t, is likewise barely a hairline. Julian sees in the shimmering little hazelnut-cosmos just how fragile everything is. But in her wonder, a reassuring voice speaks to her, declaring that three things are true about this little ball of reality: God made it, God loves it, God keeps it. And it is for those three (Trinitarian) reasons that all things continue to exist, moment after miraculous moment.
God’s creative and sustaining love pulsates through every molecule, every atom, every quark and lepton and boson. Because of the Divine love that literally knits all things together, the universe is a place of limitless freedom and possibility. Any one moment in space and time is merely a snapshot of how things were — not how things must forever be. In the sovereignty of God’s love each of us is free — free to celebrate what is good, and to change what is not.
Trusting that all things exist by the love of God can revolutionize how we live our lives. It means that we never have to admit defeat against the forces of death, chaos, violence and despair. For no matter how grim or seemingly hopeless things might seem, knowing that we are always given our being through love means that we always have resources at our disposal to change things for the better. Even if circumstances become so bad that we literally are left with no choice, we always have the choice to hope, to pray, to trust in God and in the light and that the power of good will always, eventually, triumph over the forces of evil.
What Julian is telling us, very simply, is that the universe we live in is safe. That’s not to say there is no danger, for of course danger exists, and it is a fact of life that we will all in some way or another suffer and eventually die. But we suffer and die in the love of God. Knowing this, and learning to pray and praise our way through it, just might set off a revolution of consciousness. Knowing that we emerge from love and exist by love empowers us to make loving choices and to cultivate the spirit of love in all we do, say, and think. And that is a key to unlocking the mysteries of God, including the mystery of peace, the mystery of hope, and the mystery of standing up to change things — all things — for the better.
Heavenly God, in you we live and move and have our being, and we know that our being emerges from your love. Help us to live every day in the light of your love, and with awareness of how your love empowers us to do what is right and to embody true peace and joy. In Christ we pray, Amen.
Francis of Assisi on Holiness
Holiness is not an accomplishment of the self, nor a fullness which one gives oneself. It is first of all an emptiness which one discovers and accepts, and which God comes to fill in the measure that the person opens himself to His fullness… To contemplate the glory of God… to discover that God is God, eternally God, beyond what we are or can be, to rejoice fully in what he is, to be in ecstasy before his eternal youth and to thank him for himself, for his unfailing mercy, that is the most profound demand of that love which the Spirit of the Lord does not cease to pour into our hearts. That’s what it is to have a pure heart.
— Francis of Assisi, as quoted in
Passing from Self to God:
A Cistercian Retreat
by Robert Thomas, OCSO
The Message of the Mystics
People ask me all the time if I’m working on a new book. The answer is yes — I’ve actually been developing an idea since late last year. I realized, though, that I haven’t mentioned it on the blog yet, mainly because I have intentionally been limiting the amount of time I’ve been putting in to the blog, for a variety of reasons.
Anyway, now seems to be as good a time as any to post a few words about my new project. Bear in mind, of course, that this is very much a work in progress, so the concept could morph/change considerably over the months to come (and there’s always the chance that I’ll ditch this idea completely and put my energy into a different direction). So, with that disclaimer in mind… what I am exploring is this question: “What does it mean to apply the wisdom of at least some of the great mystics of history to the spiritual life today?” In other words, how can the wisdom of, say, Julian of Norwich, John Ruusbroec, or even more recent mystics like Evelyn Underhill and Thomas Merton, make a practical difference in our lives today?
After all, it’s one thing to read the mystics, and even take inspiration from them… but what do we need to do in order to truly apply their wisdom to our lives? This is particularly germane to those of us who do not live in a consecrated religious setting (like a monastery or convent). Many of the mystics throughout history, at least in the Christian tradition, have been monks or nuns — and their writing is geared toward others who share their vowed life. This is not to suggest that only monastics can be mystics or contemplatives; after all, a key message of writers like Underhill and Merton (and others, like Karl Rahner) is that mystical spirituality is for everyone. But what does that mean? What difference does the teaching of the mystics make to ordinary folks trying to make it through the day here in the twenty-first century? What is the relationship between mysticism and religion, or mysticism and postmodern values and ethics, or mysticism and social justice? Those are big questions, but how do we answer them in practical, down-to-earth ways?
I realize in writing this post that what I’m describing is still very amorphous and abstract — after all, my work on this project is in its early stages, and I don’t want to say too much more precisely because the project is so young. But my goal over the next year or so will be to combine stories from the lives of some of the mystics themselves, with stories from my life or the lives of others alive today, that will help to illuminate how the message of the mystics can transform, liberate, and enlighten us, here and now, today.
Stay tuned… more to come…
(via Blogpress for iPad)
Quote for the Day
When our soul has been purged and feels free from evil passions, it experiences a great craving for spiritual things. Like a famished person, it longs for many different kinds of pious practices, mortification, penance, humility, charity, and prayer. To have so keen an appetite is a good sign, but you must consider whether you can properly digest all you want to eat. From among all such desires choose, according to your spiritual director’s advice, those you can practice and fulfill at present. Turn them to your best advantage, and this done, God will send you others that you can practice in due time. In this way you will never waste time in useless desires. I don’t say that you must give up any of these good desires but say that you must bring them all forth in good order. Those that cannot be immediately put into effect should be stored away in some corner of your heart until their time comes, and meanwhile you can put into effect the ones that are mature and in season. I give this advice not only to the spiritual minded but also to worldly people. Without it we will live only in anxiety and confusion.
— Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life
Quote for the Day
It is manifestly unjust that a privileged few should continue to accumulate excess goods, squandering available resources, while masses of people are living in conditions of misery at the very lowest level of subsistence. Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness—both individual and collective—are contrary to the order of creation, an order which is characterized by mutual interdependence.
— Blessed John Paul II, as quoted in The Green Bible
Quote for the Day
The church is the cross on which Christ is crucified today.
— Romano Guardini, as quoted in
My Life with the Saints
by James Martin, SJ
Quote for the Day
In modern Western society, many people turn away from the Christianity of their formative years because they find its truths smothered under an unreal kind of religiosity. They see that the people in the churches are not changing and becoming better, but rather are comforting themselves and each other in their unregenerate state. They find that the spirit of the Western churches is, at its core, little different from that of the world around them. Having removed from Christianity the Cross of inward purification, these churches have replaced a direct, intuitive apprehension of Reality and a true experience of God with intellectualism on the one hand and emotionalism on the other.
In the first case, Christianity becomes something that is acquired through rote learning, based on the idea that if you just get the words right — if you just memorize key Scripture verses, intellectually grasp the concepts and repeat them, know how to act and speak in the religious dialect of your particular sect — you will be saved. Christianity then becomes a dry, word-based religion, a legalistic system, a set of ideas and behaviors, and a political institution that operates on the same principles as the institutions of this world.
In the second case, the Western churches add the element of emotionalism and enthusiasm in order to add life to their systems, but this becomes just as grossly material as religious legalism. People become hypnotized by their self-induced emotional states, seeing a mirage of spiritual ascent while remaining bound to the material world.
This is not direct perception of Reality; it is not the Ultimate. It is no wonder, then, that Western spiritual seekers, even if they have been raised in Christian homes, begin to look elsewhere, into Eastern religions.
— Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao
Quote for the Day
So just let God act, and be at peace. As far as you are in God, you are in peace; and as far as you are outside God, you are outside peace. Lack of peace comes from created things and not from God. Nor is there anything to fear in God, and nothing in him to cause sadness; his being can draw only love from us. It is true: they who have all they wish for, know joy; but no one has this except those whose will is one with God’s will. May God grant us this union!
— Meister Eckhart, quoted in
Conversations with Meister Eckhart
by Simon Parke
The New Abbey Store
The Monastery of the Holy Spirit has opened a new Monastic Heritage Center, including a museum of monastic culture — housed in an old barn where the monks lived when they first came to Georgia in 1944, a greenhouse and garden center, a coffee shop, and a new Abbey Store. The entire center is beautiful, and I believe the museum will do wonders to draw more people to contemplative spirituality (as well as help stimulate vocations to monastic life). Here’s a short video I made on Friday, minutes before the store opened for a donor’s reception. It opened to the public yesterday. So if you want to visit, its hours are Monday through Saturday 10 – 5 and Sunday 12:30 – 4:30. Hopefully I’ll see you there!
The Beatles and the Book of Kells
Check out this video. It’s plenty of fun in a postmodern sort of way. Apparently some teachers in Hawaii have been creating song paradies (à la Weird Al) that teach history. You can read about their efforts in this Washington Post Article: Learning the French Revolution with Lady Gaga: Teachers sing history lessons
Of course, the video that caught my eye teaches about the creation of the Book of Kells, set to the Beatles’ Nowhere Man. Enjoy…
Bin Laden’s Death: Christian and Buddhist Perspectives
Two people I admire have posted thoughtful reflections on the death of Osama Bin Laden, and how we who practice intentional spirituality might best respond to this event. Both columns are well worth reading.
Fr. James Martin, SJ, author of My Life with the Saints and The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, articulates The Christian Response to Bin Laden’s Death.
Susan Piver, author of How Not to Be Afraid of Your Own Life and The Wisdom of a Broken Heart, offers a Buddhist perspective when she asks Should We Have Celebrated Osama Bin Laden’s Death?
