Understanding Paul Non-Dually
Summary: Sunday, April 12-Friday, April 17, 2015
The Spirit in me awakens the only power that can obey the law or know its true purpose. (Sunday)
The purpose of spiritual law is to sharpen your own awareness about who you really are and who God is for you. There you will recognize your own radical insufficiency and, in that same movement, find God’s fullness. (Monday)
You come to God not by being strong, but by being weak; not by being right, but through your mistakes. (Tuesday)
The revelation of the death and resurrection of Jesus forever redefines what success and winning mean—and it is not what any of us want or expect. (Wednesday)
Paul is indeed a teacher of adult Christianity. Keep experiencing your experiences, and depending on divine guidance as he did; watch how the scales begin to fall from your eyes as they did from Paul’s (Acts 9:18). (Thursday)
If religion is to be reborn at any dynamic level that is really going to change society or change the world, we must understand that spiritual reality, consciousness, or Spirit, if you will, is the true reality and all the rest, including the material world, emerges from it. (Friday)
Practice: Prayer for Understanding
Though we aren’t certain if Paul personally or fully wrote the letter to the Ephesians that bears his name (it’s more likely that one of Paul’s students composed the letter), this passage beautifully summarizes Paul’s deep longing for his faith community. “The power to comprehend” lies not in knowledge, but in experiencing our own weakness and being filled with the Spirit of Love.
Receive the blessing of this prayer, reading it several times slowly, aloud if possible, perhaps choosing a phrase to memorize and return to throughout your day:
I bow my knees before the Father,
from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name.
I pray that, according to the riches of God’s glory,
God may grant that you may be strengthened
in your inner being with power through the Spirit,
and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith,
as you are being rooted and grounded in love.
I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints,
what is the breadth
and length
and height
and depth,
and to know the love of Christ
that surpasses knowledge,
so that you may be filled
with all the fullness of God.
—Ephesians 3:14-19
Gateway to Silence:
“When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10).
For Further Study:
Great Themes of Paul: Life as Participation (CD)
Jesus as Liberator/Paul as Liberator (MP3 download)
New Great Themes of Scripture (CD)
St. Paul: The Misunderstood Mystic (CD, MP3 download)
Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality
