Christian Spirituality

Bruce Bibee

 

This essential core of each of us can legitimately sing out, Yes! I, too, am Absolute Truth. I and the Father are One.

 

I’m a recovering Catholic. It began when I was expelled from a Franciscan seminary when I was 16 years old. I was studying to be a priest, but my big mouth got me into constant trouble. They kicked me out for “intellectual arrogance.” Imagine that.

 

Since, because of my age, I felt God Himself rejected me, I eventually looked East to find spirituality. I studied Zen, yoga and Taoism. I meditated, and had an asana routine I did every morning. I also trained in Kung-Fu. Then, I went to a workshop with Father Michael Fox (author of Original Blessing, a must-read for recovering Catholics). At one of the breaks, I spoke to him about my seminary-expulsion. He told me, “Your spiritual roots are Christian. You will have to heal that some day.” So, I did.

 

To explain how, we have to start with a distinction between exoteric religion and esoteric spirituality; otherwise, nothing makes much sense. Exoteric can be loosely translated as meaning “for general consumption.” Esoteric, loosely translated, is “for a specialized few.” Exoteric, however, is the foundation for the esoteric. It’s like learning basic math before you can get into calculus. Exoteric religion lays the groundwork (ethics, morals, ritual, awareness, etc.) so the esoteric exploration of spirituality can begin.

 

The typical problem comes from those who run the exoteric enterprises. They have a vested, financial interest in discouraging the esoteric, because the practice of advanced spirituality cuts out the middle-men (the priests, rabbis, ministers, mullahs, and so on). This is why marginalizing mystics is a universal past-time of clerics. Another reason is because mystics the world over are saying the same kinds of things.

 

For example, the Sufi poet Rumi said: Lead us. When we’re totally surrendered to that beauty, we’ll become a mighty kindness. And Meister Eckhart, a 14th Century Dominican mystic said: For we pray, ‘lead us not.’ But then we pray to be freed from evil, from a sin already committed. ‘Deliver us from evil’ also means ‘from the devil,’ because he is the one who speaks evil or because of the relentless warfare which he wages against us. ‘From evil’ can mean from the vice of asking for things which are carnal or temporal. ‘One might be ashamed to ask for what one is not ashamed to desire.’ If one is conquered by greed, then a good prayer is to be freed from the very evil of greediness.

 

It is the nature of mystics to foster a direct intuition of the Divine, to develop a direct relationship with God-as-you-know-him, to move beyond the form of religion and pierce its mysterious depths. To do so, one must move beyond the rational mind (and all things ‘carnal or temporal’). As Rabbi David Aaron says it:  This is the meaning of the verse in Psalm 111: “The beginning of true wisdom is awe of G-d.” The beginning of wisdom is awe, to see what is there, not through the filters of your words or your concepts or your biases.

 

Seeing life with the eyes of awe and wonder means to see without any expectations to understand, without trying to fit it into whatever we already know. Rather than trying to adapt what we see to our minds, we must adapt our minds to what is. Awe and wonder is an act of surrender. I give my mind over to what is, rather then expect what is to fit into my mind.

 

Centering or contemplative prayer is how this is accomplished within a Christian context. Through prayer, the mind is brought under conscious control so it can bear witness to the Divine within all things. The guidelines for contemplative prayer are such:

Choose a sacred word as the symbol of your intention to consent to God's presence and action within.

Sitting comfortably and with eyes closed, settle yourself and silently introduce the sacred word as the symbol of your consent to 

God's presence and action within.

 

When you become aware of thoughts, return ever-so-gently to the sacred word.

 

At the end of the prayer period, remain in silence with eyes closed for a couple of minutes. 

(See www.thecentering.org/centering_method.html for more.)

 

This looks like mantra meditation. And it is. All the great traditions figured out the monkey-mind was the obstacle to spiritual development. Meditation, by whatever name, is how it’s done.

 

Once this first step is achieved, and the mind is no longer an obstacle but a willing agent of growth, the traditions within Christianity follow slightly different mystic paths. Catholics, with their long history of desert Fathers, monasteries, and abbeys, have often pursued the course of the sacred marriage with the Divine Beloved. In fact, the Holy Grail is a symbol of this path. The Grail is the empty cup in one’s own heart waiting to be filled with Divine Grace—the Presence of the Beloved.

 

Protestant mystics, mostly because of their iconoclastic roots, seek righteousness, which is synonymous with direct contact with God’s Will. How both accomplish their mystic goals, though, is the same: contemplative prayer comes first; interacting with passages in the Bible comes next (not unlike guided imagery); intuiting the source behind Biblical stories comes next; and, finally, living from a direct experience of the Divine is achieved.

 

What is also achieved is escape from the confines of religion. Adoration and worship are abandoned as relationship with the Divine is embraced. And this is where all mystics tend to get into trouble. Al-Hallaj, another Sufi mystic, once proclaimed, I am Absolute Truth. He was killed as a heretic. Jesus announced, I and the Father are One. They killed him, too. However, as one’s relationship with the Divine matures, one discovers one’s own inner Divinity—the spark or breath of God within. This essential core of each of us can legitimately sing out, Yes! I, too, am Absolute Truth. I and the Father are One.

 

Or, as the late Trappist mystic Thomas Merton wrote in Bread in the Wilderness: What has happened? We have been transformed. The process is more than a tragic catharsis. This is more than the psychological impact of a work of art, in which our emotions, clenched in a dramatic crisis, have been sprung, have been released, and have achieved a vital fulfillment by a poetic solution of the problem in which we have allowed ourselves to become emotionally involved. There is something much deeper. It is a spiritual solution. It is a kind of death and a sea-change, operated as it were at the bottom of a spiritual ocean, because it can just as well happen to us when the Psalm, having become insipid to us by continual repetition, has ceased to have any immediate artistic appeal. And I may add that it might even happen to someone who has never quite been attuned to the full poetic quality of the Psalms.... The peculiar mystical impact with which certain verses of Psalms suddenly produce this silent depth-charge in the heart of the contemplative is only to be accounted for by the fact that we, in the Spirit, recognize the Spirit singing in ourselves.
  

Bruce Bibee, MTP, is a Licensed Professional Counselor and a Kung-Fu San Soo Master. You can reach him at 562-1242, or visit his web-page: www.brucebibee.com.