God as Us: Week 2
Summary: Sunday, November 12-Friday, November 17, 2017
We do not create this temple; we only occasionally dwell within it—by a daring respect and a risky surrender. (Sunday)
“Agape is what emerges from the refiner’s fire when that surging desire to cling, possess, consume the object of one’s adoring is subjected to the discipline of kenosis, self-giving love.” —Cynthia Bourgeault (Monday)
Twice a year we pause the Daily Meditations to ask for your support. Read a special message from CAC’s Executive Director, Michael Poffenberger, and consider donating to this important work! (Tuesday)
“Conscious love is ‘love in the service of inner transformation’—or if you prefer, ‘inner transformation in the service of love.’ Either way, this is exactly what Jesus was about.” —Cynthia Bourgeault (Wednesday)
“You cannot believe in or practice unitive consciousness as long as you exclude and marginalize others—whether it is women or people of different sexual orientations or people of religious or ethnic minorities or, in my experience, people with intellectual disabilities.” —Tim Shriver (Thursday)
Of course, we all belong. There is no issue of more or less in the eyes of an Infinite God. Yet the ego believes the lie that there isn’t enough to go around and that for me to succeed or win, someone else must lose. (Friday)
Practice: Love Upwelling
Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” (Matthew 22:39), not “as much as you love yourself.” We are to love our neighbor in the same way we love ourselves. “We love because God has first loved us” (1 John 4:19). When we accept the unconditional love and undeserved mercy that God offers us—knowing that we are not worthy of it—then we can allow God to love others through us in the same way. It’s God in you loving you, warts and all, and God in you loving others as they are. This is why the love you have available to give away is limitless. As Jesus told the Samaritan woman, “The water that I shall give you will turn into a spring inside of you, welling up into limitless life” (John 4:14).
The following exercise is based on a teaching from Friar Francisco de Osuna, OFM (1492-1542), the spiritual “master” of Teresa of Ávila. In my words, here is what he taught his students:
- Dam up the fountain of your soul, where love is always springing forth.
- It will be forced to rise.
- Yet it will remain quiet and at rest within you; wait for that quiet.
- You will see the image of God reflected in your own clear waters, more resplendent than in any other thing—provided the disturbing turmoil of thoughts dies down.
Below is a simple commentary and aid on this teaching, so that you can experience it for yourself. It is quite similar to what the Hindus discovered in tantra, where you hold the powerful gift so that it can be deepened and refined before being expressed.
Try to stay beneath your thoughts, neither fighting them nor thinking them. Hold yourself at a deeper level than your mind, perhaps in your chest, solar plexus, or breath; stay in your body self. Resist any desire to repress or express; allow animal contentment. It will feel like nothing or darkness. Stay “crouched” there at the cellular level without shame, long enough for Another Source to begin to flow and well up as light or joy.
This is the “super-essential life.” From this place you become seeing, and the love flows through you from the Source as an energy more than as an idea. You cannot “think” God. God is never an “object” of consciousness like any other thing, person, or event that you “know.” God is always and forever the subject, the doer, the initiator, “the Prevenient Grace.” You have then “become” what you hope to see. Subject and object are one. God in you and through you sees and loves God—in yourself and in others, too.
Gateway to Silence:
We are temples of God.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring Within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2016), 367-368.
For Further Study:
Richard Rohr, Gate of the Temple: Spirituality and Sexuality (Center for Action and Contemplation: 1991), CD, MP3 download
Richard Rohr, God as Us! The Sacred Feminine and the Sacred Masculine, (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2011), CD, DVD, MP3 download
