Blindness

You cannot see what you really are—“the light of the world” (Matthew 5.14)—because your awareness is clouded and blocked by sin. Sin’s become such a hackneyed and loaded term that it’s almost worthless. Sin’s not doing this or that, thinking such and so. What some call sin is the sour fruit of sin, not sin itself. Sin’s deeper. It’s original—that is, it sits at the center and origin of your life, like something foul dumped at the mouth of the pristine mountain spring that is your truest self, made by God.

Sin is falsehood. It’s separation from the truth of the splendor of who you are in Christ. It’s the fall from the truth that you are, at heart, one with Christ. Sin splits you apart from Christ and who you really are. It creates a self that St. Paul called “the flesh”—that sinful self is at war with the beauty and goodness of who you are made to be. That self, fallen from its original splendor, contracts and shrinks into itself. Then in order to protect itself, it conjures up an illusion and does everything in its power to keep that illusion intact. The falsehood sin wants you to believe is that you are here, God is over there, and there’s a vast chasm between the two.

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Fire

You’ve gathering around the little fire you’ve made for yourself from Holy Scripture. You’ve begun to feel its heat. It might not be much, but it’s something—and that something’s enough to keep you alive. What I tell you now is very important; don’t miss it, even though it will take you awhile to understand it. The heat isn’t coming from outside you, but from within. You are on fire. I wish I could show you what a torch you already are for God (Matthew 5.14-16). I can’t, you’ve got to discover that for yourself. The path you’re running isn’t outside you; it’s not beyond you, somewhere else. True, God is out there; God is above and beyond you. But the mystery Jesus made known is that the fullness of God—what he called “the kingdom of God”—is among us. What’s more, it’s “within you” (Luke 17.21). You’re not running toward a cathedral or a monastery. You don’t have to climb mountains and cross oceans. It’s not a heavenly city or life-after-death you seek. Nor do you need a teacher to show you the way (1 John 2.27). No, no, no. None of that. The fullness of God is within you (Ephesians 3.17-19).

That that’s hard to believe doesn’t make it untrue. It just means that we’re strangers to a fact hidden from us, a truth Jesus came to make known. But you’re waking up, and that’s proof you’re willing to let go of all that wants to keep you blind to the splendor of the Fire burning within you.

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Face to Face with God

My father's a mountaineer.  He doesn't hike; he saunters.  He'll quote Thoreau on this, refering to his essay, Walking, and what it means to go a la Sainte Terre---to "saunter."  Like Thoreau he walks slowly and lovingly upon the Earth and sees what my first- and even second-glance cannot see. As a saunterer, he's a Holy-Lander. He doesn’t just see the granite that forms these peaks, he discerns the mighty forces that belched all this from Earth’s belly; he senses the achingly long, painful processes that twisted and tilted these rocks into these splendid mountains. He sees more than meets the eye. He doesn’t just look at the Earth; he experiences every blessed part as holy. Spiritually, you must do the same.

When I say you must hold loosely to form, I mean that you must be able to look beyond words and doctrines, rules and rituals while still honoring them, and discern the substance they bear. In the case of Holy Scripture, you must be able to look deeply into and beyond the words to behold the Word. You seek direct, first-hand spiritual experience, not indirect or second-hand. At some point, you must stop thinking about words and behold the Word.

Isn’t this what Holy Communion requires you to do? Heaven help you if you cling to the Bread and Wine and miss the One they bear. But I’m sure you don’t do that. In prayer you let the forms—these signs of Christ—point the way, then you enter the silence and mystery. And as you do, the grace of the Holy Spirit carries you in faith beyond the elements themselves into the Elemental—the Holy Trinity.

In the presence of the One the Bread and Wine bear, the forms vanish and you’re face to Face with God.

If you have eyes to see.

Run

As essential as Holy Scripture is, the Book itself is not the goal. While you must never depart from it, you must also never get stuck in it. The life you seek is not in the Book. Jesus warned the religious of his day about just this: “You’re so devoted to the scriptures, thinking that they’ll give you eternal life; but you’ve missed Me” (John 5.39). Everything they were looking for was standing right in front of them, but they were so attached to the words they missed the Word, so fond of the goads they lost sight of the Goal. You don’t want to do that. But don’t judge them. It’s easy to become merely religious. Merely religious is what you’ll be if you get attached to the outward forms of religion but miss its interior power (2 Timothy 3.5). It’s also easy, even fashionable today, to be “spiritual, but not religious.” Go this route and you’ll seek the interior power of religion but you’ll want nothing to do with religion’s exterior forms. Both extremes are mistakes. Look, if the Incarnation means anything at all, it means that form and Spirit are one; you can’t have one without the other. Jesus embraced the mortal human form and made it divine, but didn’t hold it so tightly he couldn’t let it go when the time came for something new (Philippians 2.6-8). You too must learn to “let go” of what you know and cherish. Unless you do, you’ll never see the fullness of God (John 20.17).

So, don’t get attached to the forms of religion and get stuck in them. But don’t reject them either. Instead, hold them loosely, honoring them as Jesus did. Scripture, in particular, has one purpose—to unite you with God, to gather you into life eternal. The prophets, sages, and apostles are pointing the way.  Now go, eagerly—or better, run desperately . . . as desperately as you’d run toward water if suddenly you found your head was set on fire.

The Goal is Everything.

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Scripture

Prayer is more than words, but it’s got to start with words if it’s to go beyond them and into the Great Silence, which is the language of God. So, as you seek the Ineffable, consider well the words you gather yourself. You’ve chosen the psalms as a guide to prayer. They’ve involved you in the particular style of language used by those who’ve found trustworthy paths into the Mystery. So now, having spoken—or better, sung a psalm—gather yourself around a little fire made of the words of God’s prophets, sages, and apostles and dwell there for a awhile.

Your time with them needn’t be long. Just a few minutes, attentive before this fire you’re building for yourself is enough to warm you up to God. But take care that you don’t overdo it. You need kindling, not the branch of a tree. These words are incendiary, and just a few will kindle a blaze. But that doesn’t mean more is better—drop too much Scripture onto this traveler’s fire, and you’ll do more harm than good. Your religious ego might tell you that you ought to read a whole chapter and study it thoroughly, while the irreligious part of you hollers that you don’t have the time for any of it; you’ve got a project to get to or kids to take to school. Truth is, you do have time for what your heart needs most—just a twig is enough to keep this fire of your faith burning.

My practice is to read very slowly through, say, the Sermon on the Mount, or the Song of Songs . . . one or two verses a day. My aim is just to gather around Scripture, awakening my heart to God, feeding the flame of devotion.

So, take a little text, and let it first rest in your mind. Then draw the words down into your heart and let them dwell there. Allow a single word or phrase or image to focus your attention. You may be intrigued by it, confused, or even repulsed. The point is not to do anything about your response, but rather simply to experience it. You’re not to think about this encounter as much as you are to look at it and sit with it, dwelling with these written words that come from someone else’s living encounter with the One you seek. You’re reading is intentionally different from how you read other words; read for intimacy not for information, for love not for knowledge.

This is sacred reading. Just light a little fire and wait for God, you never know when a nearby bush, or something else, may go up in flames (Exodus 3.1-6).

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