Bruce Sanguin's Blog on Evolutionary Christianity

I’m teaching a course using cosmologist, Brian Swimme’s, Powers of the Universe videos. The course is called Powers of the the Universe and the Path of the Christ. The second power is allurement. In the day language of cosmological lingo, this is essentially gravity. Stuff, from atoms to alligators, is drawn together. Rocks feel the pull of Earth. At the human level, this power of attraction is also felt as love. Attraction leads to communion, which leads to increased complexity, which eventuates in conscious self-awareness. As Swimme points out, it didn’t have to be this way. Atoms could have remained independent units that remained that way for eternity. But we’re involved in a universe that is hard-wired for attract, interact, commune, and complexify.

What’s great about this is that to evolve you don’t really need to do much of anything, except reawaken to whatever it is that is deeply alluring.Choreographer, Martha Graham, put it this way:

““There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

In other words, find what you love (discovered in the “urges that motivate you” and let these draw you into your future.  Easy to say, but it’s not as easy as you might think. By the time most of us get to adulthood, we’re twisted out of shape—by emotional trauma, cultural propaganda about “the good life”, and a society focused almost exclusively on an economic goals. Add to this Christianity’s suspicion of any form of desire, and you can see why following your bliss is a nice slogan, but getting there is another story. It’s why so few of us actually do it.

It doesn’t help that Christianity has pretty much painted a picture of Jesus as a killjoy—despite the fact that his detractors accused him of being a drunkard and a glutton. Everything seems to be about crucifying the self with its desires. Follow Jesus to the cross, not to what lights you up. But what if the self that needs to be crucified is the contracted self and its desires? In a contracted state it’s not a great idea to follow your bliss because you’ll end up addicted to some substance or process. The addiction serves to protect us and distract us from having to look at what caused us to contract in the first place—whether it’s emotional or social. So, yeah, there’s a need for discernment when it comes to the power of allurement. The fearful, anxiety-ridden self does need to follow Jesus to the cross, or to the river to be baptized and born again—there to die (or I prefer, contextualized by the divine or expansive self).

And the fastest way I know of being reborn is to fall in love with life—could be your dog, a tree, the ocean, your lover, Christ, the Buddha, or your guru. It doesn’t really matter. Just allow yourself to be in a state of pure adoration, which when you think about it is practice of pushing allurement to the max. This is the devotional path whereby you allow yourself to be gobsmacked by the mystery, the beauty, and the radiance of an other. My experience is that when we are taken by adoration, a presence arises from within the other that’s as close to what we mean by G_d as we’ll ever get to.  The theological sense I make of this from within my tradition is that the Christ is the alluring centre, the Heart of the divine, dispersed throughout all of creation. The Christ is the power of sacred allurement evoking a “blessed unrest” to be involved in the perfection of completion of love. This is why if you love anything or anybody with wild abandon, with adoration, you lose your (contracted) self, but gain your soul. To practice adoration or devotion is to discover the natural joy (and deep relief) of being in service to that which is evoking our adoration. (That is, service is not the drudgery it’s sometimes made out to be, but rather the deepest expression of freedom we can know).

In the course I’m teaching, the conversation turned to the experience that seemed to be common of people showing up at church and weeping for the first few months. I’ve seen this a lot. Personally, my interpretation is that a grief arises in sacred space because it’s a kind of homecoming. The grief is for how hard it has been to live without surrendering to love. In this place, a promise is reignited. This, we say to ourselves, is why I showed up for the adventure in the first place. In Christian language, we feel the presence of Christ drawing us to lose ourselves in devotion—pure yearning to be transformed by the love and into the love that is alluring us.

So, today’s practice is to track and trust what is deeply alluring. Listen primarily to your body, because your dissociated (contracted) thoughts are conditioned to keep us living what somebody else thinks we should desire.  Even if it’s the buzz of those first few drinks that attracts you, trust the feeling of confidence, unity, and connection that it provides, but be suspicious of the delivery mechanism. Engage in a fearless inquiry about what’s stopping you from feeling that buzz without the booze. Fall in love today.

 

 

 

Church needs to take incarnation more seriously. In all the talk around church transformation, orienting from the body (one’s own and Earth’s body) is rarely part of the conversation. Yet it may be the most radical step we can take toward a renewed integrity, relevance, and ecological mode of presence.

Historically, we have limited incarnation (Spirit becoming flesh) to a single person in Jesus. Paul’s theology expanded this to help the early church imagine itself as the body of Christ in the world. But what if Spirit actually manifests in, through, and as, bodies, human, animal, vegetative, and geological? What if Isaiah got it exactly right that “the whole Earth is full of G_d’s glory”, and that this includes bodies?  Our seminaries still teach, as far as I know, that there are three primary sources of revelation—scripture, tradition, and reason. Conspicuously absent from this teaching is our own experience—which is mediated by our bodies. When reason is dissociated from the wisdom of the body, it gets abstract and academic pretty quick. Imagine teaching our children that their bodies were a kind of scripture that they could learn how to read in order to know G_d?

What’s been missing is a truly positive view (let alone experience) of the body— that is, gaining a deep respect the inherent intelligence and evolutionary elegance of the flesh. We don’t have practices in Christianity that help us to tune into the body’s wisdom as a way of orienting to Spirit. Traditionally, the body has been the problem that Christ “came” to solve. Essentially, this meant transcending the bodily impulses (read sex and an assumed insatiable narcissism/greed) in order to live the good (moral) life. Being moral came down to exercising sufficient willpower to adhere to an external set of rules and codes of conduct—in other words obeying laws handed down from on high.  The “good” Christian (in the worst sense of the word as Mark Twain put it) has a deep, unconscious distrust of the body and its desire.

And yet, the prophet Jeremiah imagined a time when all the laws would be “written upon our hearts”(Jeremiah 31:33). He foresaw a time when there would be no need for teachers of the law because we would have access to the wisdom of the heart (and the lungs, liver, kidneys, skin cells, etc.). Jesus essential message was that we had become overly dependent upon a set of external conventions (the law), when what we needed to do was to find a new, interior guidance system—Jeremiah’s “heart”, which is the compass of the senses, the movement of emotions, and intuitions that guide us in the ways of Spirit, moment by moment.

It’s not that moral teachings or external codes of conduct are wrong. They served and to a degree, still serve, in our early stages of development as a way to moderate our evolutionary impulses for survival, sex, and security. But ever since St. Augustine expressed his deep fear of his own sexuality and invoked Christ to help him transcend his own nature, we have been left with the rather blunt instrument of willpower and the threat of shame to control ourselves and others. Before Christianity, Hinduism understood that these early, natural impulses were not wrong, but rather entry level portals into deeper yearnings of the body/mind, body/soul, and body/spirt for communion with Source.

Even if most of us have intellectually moved beyond associating our  wants and needs (our nature) with shame, functionally we distrust them. Yet it is my experience that every time I have tracked and trusted where my body wants to lead me, I am led into restoration and healing—into and through shame and into my birthright of joy and deep connection. It is also true that most of the suffering I’ve experienced, and caused others, originates in my willful over-riding of my deepest wants and needs. This over-riding is the result of shame in my own nature, my lack self-acceptance.

Our spiritual practices have been focused primarily on transcendence. But today we need practices of incendence, that help us to deeply inhabit our bodies. Transcendence represents the vertical dimension of the spiritual path, receiving from above and beyond. But perhaps more important at this point in our history is the horizontal dimension, constituted by deep relationality with the community of life. This is the shamanic path.

The shaman deepens relationship by taking the initiate  inward and downward, through body, into Earth, into connection with ancestry, human and other-than-human, and the whole living universe from which we have been disconnected, even dissociated. My friend and Anglican priest, Chris Dierkes, has been reclaiming Jesus as shaman, and I think he’s on the right track. The way forward is the way back to our own nature and deeper into Earth’s intelligence, there to grieve what we’ve lost, and to reclaim the inheritance we squandered.

This will involve a metanoia of our sacred rituals. We’ll need to allow our bodies to move, be moved, and to move us. Our bodies will lead us into prayer and ecstatic celebration, as we allow ourselves to feel the rhythms of Earth and universe, radiant with the glory of G_d.

 

 

 

 

 

For most of human history, we were nomadic. We lived closer to Earth, according to her rhythms and cycles. We took what Earth provided, recognizing that we were dependent upon, and naturally limited by, the gifts of nature. Life was more precarious. We were physically on the move, following the seasons and the migration of wild animals and plants. This was before the advent of the agricultural era and the settling down of the human species. We learned to domesticate the land and animals. It was inevitable that our own wild nature would be domesticated. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. We’re evolutionarily wired for safety and security. Learning to exploit our environment to these ends was natural and inevitable. However, something essential has been lost in our domestication and consequent disconnection from Earth.

At a visceral level, we miss our wild nature, our inner nomad. It’s built into us. The more we organize our lives around pension plans, insurance products, and long term security, the more we become alienated from this evolutionary inheritance. We’re hyper-domesticated. Our dreams drop us into our sensual, intuitive way of orienting our lives to reality. They tend to compensate for our waking personas. Wild animals brush by us or chase us, indicating dissociated energy that wants back into the game.

I’ve written elsewhere about how my own nomadic nature shows up as an irrational urge to start walking and not stop—my inner Forest Gump. I want no maps, no itinerary, and no forethought for where I’m going to end up. A different kind of guidance systems kicks in, sensual and intuitive. When I’ve given myself the opportunity, the synchronicities never fail to amaze. My soul feels liberated.  Guess this is a scaled down version of the Maori walkabout or finding one’s own song line.

Scripture captures the cost of this loss in stories about the transition from the nomadic to the domesticated agriculturalist (which is typically associated with a violence that is enacted against our wild nature). In the story of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:1-12) Abel is a keeper of sheep (semi-nomadic) and Cain is a tiller of soil (farmer). Notice that G_d prefers Abel’s offering. Cain pouts. The Lord asks him what his problem is, assuring Cain that he’s going to end up ruling over Abel ( a nod to historical reality). But Cain murders his brother anyway. Cain is cursed by G_d (and yet paradoxically defended against retaliation). Out of this act of violence Cain builds the first city, naming it after this firstborn son, Enoch.

As I read this it seems clear that the author laments the emergence of agricultural society (along with the city culture that is built upon an original violence). Yet s/he sees it as an historical inevitability that is necessary to come to terms with. It is an expression of humanity’s fall from grace, but still falls under divine providence.

Again, in the story of Jacob and Esau we see this transition played out. Esau is a hairy man, who lives in the fields. Jacob is a “plain” man, dwelling in tents. Jacob and his mother, Rebbecca, are portrayed as cunning, the predisposition of those who live, not instinctually like Esau, but for a future security. They collude to trick Esau out of his natural birthright. The hairy (wild) man is betrayed and dominated by the plain (domesticated) man. It’s a story that expresses the inherent violence against the birthright of own nature, (and culturally against our indigenous peoples) when instinct is dominated (rather than integrated) by reason. Jacob eventually is required to do the work of reintegration by reconciling with this brother, which is one way to understand where we are in the 21^st century—needing to reconcile with the hairy man.

Finally, when the Hebrew people are settling in the Promised Land, there are two traditions portrayed in scripture. One is all for instituting a monarchy and building a temple for the Lord—just like all the surrounding nations. The other is against it. The G_d of this tradition asks “Who told you I needed a house to live in?” This G_d had no interest in being domesticated. He was happy wandering around in the wilderness with the arc of the covenant, a portable tabernacle,  and sacred rituals-to-go.

Jesus himself was nomadic. (“The son of man has no place to rest his head”). He was an itinerant preacher, teacher, and healer. He travelled from town to town, owned no property or home as far as we know, and depended upon the hospitality of strangers. He was anti-Temple and opposed Rome’s imperial agenda to transform (domesticate) the conquered cities into mini-replicas of Rome.

As I considered this loss of our nomadic, wild nature, I wondered whether an evolutionary worldview represents one attempt to interiorize and re-integrate the nomadic impulse. The fundamental insight of this orientation is that reality is on the move. Everything is in motion, from the sub-atomic to galaxies to consciousness. Everything is coming into being and passing out of being in every moment, including what we call the “self”.  Absolute security is an illusion. The only security, in truth, is in the whole-hearted embrace of an emergent process. There are no buffers against this arising and dying. Easy come. Easy go. The practice truly is to be at ease with this coming and going. As we remove the buffers by which we’ve attempted to achieve the illusion of control, we slip into the stream of becoming. In this stream, we seek not to control the future, but to participate in its emergence by consenting to be lived by this nomadic, primordial impulse to be on the move. Part of what it means to me to be “in Christ” is a radical willingness to submit to walk ecstatically into the unique future that needs us to emerge.

 

 

 

 

One morning I watched

a brown-skinned man

take a white twenty gallon pail

from his landscaping truck,

fill it with water,

and haul it

fifty meters to a

newly planted shrub.

Unhurried,

he built a berm of soil,

so that not a drop

would miss the mark—

the thirsty roots

of this tender life.

 

His gentle pouring

was paced

to the shrub’s capacity to drink,

slow and patient.

He stood with the emptied pail

and watched, monk-like,

the soaking of soil.

 

This was no job.

This was a practice,

a love affair,

blurring the line

between giver and receiver.

 

I imagined

our Earth community

receiving a love like his—

to see what is before our eyes,

and cherish what every being can become

by the nourishment of reverence

poured out upon the lives

that are ours to tend.

 

He was not finished.

He turned his unwavering attention

to two other fortunate shrubs.

(I thought I heard them

singing at his approach.)

 

Beads of sweat now mixing with water,

the greening ones

now trust

this daily labour of love,

this consistent attunement.

They’ve learned the pleasure of anticipating

with each approaching dawn,

the arrival of this salty love

and shamelessly nurse.

 

The good folk

of this gated community

walk past the Mexican every day,

not realizing that the gracious One

has sent them a guide

to lead them home

to an unprotected life

of devotion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This practice originates in Buddhism. It feels right to me that there is an abiding perfection (completeness) in this and every moment. From one perspective this seems preposterous. How can we talk about perfection in a world or in one’s own life when a pretty solid case can be made for it all looking more like a train wreck waiting to happen? There is so much suffering and pain. It’s not easy to hold both possibilities simultaneously.

The biblical equivalent to this teaching is Jesus’ admonition to his disciples:

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! 25 And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? 26 If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest? 27 Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin,yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. (Luke 12).

Resting in the perfection can be experienced as a state of consciousness in which there is nothing to do and no place to go. It is the unborn and deathless Self, an infinite spaciousness and peacefulness, before the “strangeness” of separative consciousness descended upon us. Most of us have tasted into this state, in which where there is nothing to worry about, no past to haunt us, no future to plan for. It is timeless, pre-time, pre-space, pre-movement, and indeed, profoundly restful.

This condition is available at any moment, in meditation, but also in the daily routine of our lives. The primordial beauty of nature, for example, impresses itself upon us, stunning us into a reverie, apprehending us with an urgency to organize our personal and collective lives according to the imperative of devotion.

 

But I also experience the paradox that there is a kind of perfection in the realization of the imperfection of my life. At any given moment, I can awaken to the truth that the universe has organized itself to mirror back to me the truth of my life. When I was doing hot yoga, the front of the room was always wall-to-wall mirrors. The teaching is that you want to see yourself clearly. You want to see how and where your body is restricted. No looking away from your life. There you are. What are you going to do with yourself? No hiding. Just watch what comes up. Great practice. The world as it is perfectly mirrors our personal and collective lives. The only question is whether we’re ready to see.

Every moment then is a teaching—an opportunity to witness how we are being lived, and how the movement of our bodies and the movement of our living syncs up with what is wanting to be born in, through, and as us—or how we are out of sync. And whether we are in sync or out, it’s all just information. Judgment is replaced by curiosity and radical self-acceptance. To be in this process of being completed, with clear intention, is to be in the perfection of the life process itself.

Face it, feel it, integrate it, and move with it. This is what Thomas Hubl calls the “competency of becoming”.  Just don’t look away from what is obvious. Nothing is hidden. The whole of it arrives in every moment to heal us and move us forward.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond

—Rumi

To “rest” in this perfection is not passive acquiescence in the face of personal and planetary crises. Rather, it is grounding our desire to repair, restore, and renew within a non-anxious presence. We orient from the deep truth of our identity as the presence of the process itself finding Her/His/It’s way through us. The witness of our equanimity becomes the most effective instrument of allurement toward the integrity we seek. Neither does resting in perfection diminish the sense of urgency. Rather we contend with ignorance and blindness, in ourselves and others, with compassion, patience and trust. We cannot force the transformation. By becoming the beauty that is seeking us and for which we yearn, we cooperate with and amplify the life process with a restful, non-coercive urgency that is a far more effective and efficient catalyst.

 

 

 

 

 

A window opens. A curtain pulls back.

The lamp of lovers connect,

not at their ceramic bases,

but in their lightedness.

No lover wants union with the Beloved

without the Beloved also wanting the lover.

Love makes the lover weak,

while the Beloved gets strong.

Lightning from here strikes there.

When you begin to love God, God is loving you.

A clapping sound does not come from one hand.

A thirsty man calls out, ‘Delicious water,where are you?’

while the water moans,’Where is the water drinker?’

The thirst in our souls

is the attraction put out by the Water itself.

We belong to It,and It to us.

God’s wisdom made us lovers of one another.

In fact, all the particles of the world

are in love and looking for lovers.

Pieces of straw tremble in the presence of amber.

We tremble like iron filings

welcoming the magnet…

Spirit and matter work together like this,

in a division of labor.

Sweethearts kiss and taste the delight

before they slip into bed and mate.

The desire of each lover

is that the work of the other be perfected.

By this man-and-woman cooperation,

the world gets preserved.

Generation occurs.

Roses and blue arghawan flowers flower.

Night and day meet in a mutual hug.

So different, but they do love each other,

the day and the night, like family.

And without their mutual alternation

we would have no energy.

Every part of the cosmos is drawn toward its mate.

The ground keeps talking to the body, saying,

‘Come back! It’s better for you down here where you came from…’

We’re like four different birds,

that each had one leg tied in with the other birds.

A flopping bouquet of birds!

Death releases the binding, and they fly off,

but before that, their pulling is our pain.

Consider how the soul must be,

in the midst of these tensions,

feeling its own exalted pull.

My longing is more profound.

The birds want sweet green herbs and the water running by.

I want the infinite! I want wisdom.

These birds want orchards and meadows and vines with fruit on them.

I want a vast expansion.

They want profit and security of having enough food.

Remember what the soul wants,

because in that, eternity is wanting our souls!

Which is the meaning of the text,

They love That, and That loves them…

The gist is: whatever anyone seeks,

that is seeking the seeker.

No matter if its animal, or vegetable, or mineral.

Every bit of the universe is filled with wanting,

and whatever any bit wants,

wants the wanter!

The subject must dissolve again.

Desire’s Lessons

You know how it is.

Sometimes we plan a trip to one place,

but something takes us to another…

When a horse is being broken,

the trainer pulls it in many different directions,

so the horse will come to know

what it is to be ridden.

The most beautiful and alert horse

is one completely attuned to the rider.

God fixes a passionate desire in you,

and then disappoints you.

God does that a hundred times!

God breaks the wings of one intention

and then gives you another,

cuts the rope of contriving,

so you’ll remember your dependence.

But sometimes your plans work out!

You feel fulfilled and in control.

That’s because, if you were always failing,

you might give up.

But remember, it is by failures

that lovers stay aware of how they are loved.

Failure is the key to the kingdom within.

Your prayer should be, “Break the legs of what I want to happen.

Humiliate my desire. Eat me like candy.

It’s spring and finally, I have no will.”

(Mathnawi, III, 4391 – 4472)

—Translation, Coleman Barks

As a marriage and family therapist, I have taught pre-marriage workshops with my wife for over twenty years. The biggest challenge is always what to do about the topic of sexual intimacy. For a while couples we invited to submit questions anonymously. We stopped because all the questions invariably boiled down to two:

1. How do you deal with differences in sexual appetite?

2. How do you keep sex hot?

It’s the second question that was most perplexing. I mean, these young people were only a year, maybe two, into their relationship, and those who were sexually active (not all chose to be) were already coping with boredom in the bedroom.

Our approach involved trying to help the couple be more playful and less serious about sex. But I confess that I’ve always tackled this issue on the assumption that the couple is simply not sufficiently connected.  Good sex is an organic expression of loving intimacy. Deepen your connection, strengthen your emotional bond, listen more carefully, etc. Well, possibly. These are all certainly important dimensions of a healthy relationship.

But according to Esther Perel, in Mating In Captivity, most of the conventional therapeutic wisdom around sustaining hot sex over time has got it wrong. What turned us on originally was precisely what we didn’t know about this other person. S/he was a mysterious stranger, full of exotic and erotic possibility. It was this otherness that created desire. Think about it. We desire what we don’t have. Once we have it, desire, ahem, droops. We habituate. “Eroticism thrives on the space between self and other”.

Perel’s point is that it doesn’t take long to confuse love with merging. In order to feel safe and secure with our partner, a couple anxiously fills up the all the in-between space. We know what happens to a fire when you don’t leave space between the logs for air to circulate. Effectively, we domesticate the wildness out of our partners, and ourselves, the very wildness that made us burn with desire in the beginning. And tragically, we foster the illusion that they now belong to us. Isn’t this what marriage is all about—the security of deep belonging?

Actually, it’s only half of what marriage (committed relationship) is about. When it becomes what it’s all about, you can kiss (politely, of course) hot sex good-bye. We do not desire what we already possess. Which brings up the question, how did we start believing that we possessed our partner? There is a wild mystery about every single creature on the face of the planet, but in our egoic drive for absolute security and safety, we domesticate the wild beauty. After all, all that wildness might cause our beloved to stray, right? The sad irony is that it’s just the opposite—it’s the over-domestication of our intimates, the making-it-safe-for-us, that underlies so much sexual straying. What people look for in our “affairs” is precisely the arousal that comes from the adventure of discovery.

The evolutionary impulse is an urge toward an increase in three fundamental dynamics, and only one of them is communion. The other two are differentiation and subjectivity (interiority). If we only have communion with our mate, the relationship becomes a gooey, undifferentiated mass. And yet, where do couples get support for increasing differentiation and interiority? There are endless therapeutic models out there to help us listen more carefully, get emotionally more bonded, express our vulnerability. But where are the experts who are telling us to take separate holidays now and then, get the hell out of each other’s orbits and rhythms, move out for a while, take a complete day to rediscover who you are when you have only your own instincts and intuitions to follow?

The poet, Rilke, knew that the secret to keeping the flame of desire burning for each other was differentiation. He yearned to see his partner “whole against the sky”. Can you think of times when you experienced this, when you were caught off guard by the sexy babe walking into the room, and then suddenly realized “Holy shit, that’s my wife!”? For a brief moment, you saw her, not as an extension of yourself, but in her wholeness, in the fullness of her primal nature—and that, believe me, you have not actually domesticated. She doesn’t actually belong to you, or you to her. You are free, as is she. Free to either choose into the relationship, day by day, or not.

The exiting starts emotionally and psychologically—representing an unconsciousness need for differentiation, (but which is typically treated by marriage therapists as a failure of communion). It takes years before this internal exiting manifests as a physical withdrawal. The fantasy of absolute security smothers the fire, and it is, in any case, an illusion. Feel that? Bit scary, huh? We need to deal with our own fear in order to liberate the untamed beauty of our partner.

Incidentally, this suppression of differentiation occurs in the life of communities as well. I’ve seen many of my clergy colleagues relinquish their distinctive, unique self, while serving congregations. The congregation exerts subtle and not so subtle pressure to make-us-feel-safe by adhering to our preferred image of a holy man or woman. The minister starts to lead a double-life, never showing up in his profane, quirky, and erotic radiance in the pulpit, but reserving that for non-church gatherings. It all gets quite boring, naturally, and exit fantasies flourish.

I watched a film a couple weeks back, Rust and Bones. The protagonists are a nomadic boxer and a woman who had her legs chewed off by an orca whale. Trust the French to be able to bring off such a tasteful treatment of some pretty explicit, hot sex between this unlikely couple. I found his character compelling, possibly because he lived so close to his wildness. He fights in an illegal circuit, for example, mostly because he enjoys fighting. He fucks with a willing partner when he feels like it, with or without legs.  But he’s also capable of surprising tenderness and compassion, in bed, as well as in his life. There’s a vulnerability about him that comes to full flower by the end of the film. Interestingly, he ends up transmuting the energy of his street fighter by training with a national boxing team—still wild, but within chosen, disciplined boundaries. Perhaps this suggests a template for successful couplehood.

“Reconciling the domestic and the erotic is a delicate balancing act. It requires knowing your partner while recognizing his persistent mystery; creating security while remaining open to the unknown; cultivating intimacy that respects privacy. Desire resists confinement, and commitment mustn’t swallow freedom whole.”

 

According to Nassim Nicolas Taleb, author of AntiFragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, (weighing in at a wopping 509 pages), we’ve become obsessed with predictability and the illusion of control. “Black Swans“, the title of his last book, are large, improbable and consequential events (like WW1 or the rise of the internet) which are never predictable. And as society becomes evermore complex there are likely to be more, not less, Black Swans. The only reasonable response to this is to foster an orientation toward life that he calls “antifragile”.

Say you’re sending some your grandma’s heirloom china off to your sister. You’re going to pack it carefully and plaster “Fragile” stickers all over it, because you don’t want handlers thoughtlessly tossing the package around. When it arrives at your sister’s house, she will carefully unwrap the china, and store the set in a cabinet where it will be safe. So it is with the fragile, inorganic realm. Grandma’s china is fragile, and will break with too many bumps. Rocks are robust and can survive bigger shocks to the system. But robust only gets you half-way there.

What then is “antifragile”? It’s not merely robustness or resiliency. It has to be the opposite of fragile. It would have to be a package that you would label “Toss and kick this around a bit”. It would then suffer all manner of random, accidental jarring. And that’s a good thing. That’s how evolution works, according to Taleb, professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. Things improve when they are shocked.

Every living thing and every social system benefits from unpredictability. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It is precisely randomness, accidents, and chaos that cause systems to self-correct, self-organize, and generate unexpected innovation. You might be surprised by how many of the most effective drugs, for example, were the result of random accident, and not big pharma’s design teams. They were literally stumbled upon.

But, says Taleb, the world is run by “fragilistas”, policy wonks, academics, politicians, therapists, soccer moms and dads, clergy and scientists who feel the need to intervene and stabilize systems, relationships, children and generally control outcomes. If Taleb is right, (and at times he stretches the point), they are all control freaks who don’t trust evolution. As a result they are iatrogenic (just learned that word) ending up doing far more harm than good . The author is not short on examples, trust me, in fields ranging from medicine, urban planning, social policy, economics, education, etc. Taleb loves, and I mean loves, randomness, in the way that it exposes the hyper-rational arrogance of modernism.

I had difficulty with his neo-Darwinian assumptions about evolution. That aside, I found it a refreshing reminder of how much of life is out of our control. Life isn’t safe. Humans are the only animal with sufficient foresight to be scared to death of death, illness, and circumstances reminding us of our contingency. We’ve wrestled nature and its processes pretty much to the ground (or so we like to believe, but tell that to the Australians as their country burns). Does anybody actually feel any safer? We know the score. The terrible enactment of our illusion of control is doing more damage than death ever could to our one Earth community, our relationships, and our social systems.

Evolution isn’t predictable. It truly does thrive on randomness. And yet randomness is involved in a dance with purpose, an ecstatic dance that will always transcend the ballroom steps of our grand narratives; it will leave us feeling as often as not like we’re being ass-kicked by circumstances beyond our control. The wind, to use Bruce Cockburn’s image, will always come out of nowhere and knock us sideways.

And whatever it is we mean by G_d/G_ddess is implicate in both the sideswiping and and the patterning. So we might as well enjoy the ride. Expecting randomness and chaos to undermine our best laid plans, we learn the wisdom of surrender and deep acceptance of reality.

I can’t help but wonder what would happen if spiritual communities authentically embraced the principle of antifragility. We’d be a little more suspicious of five year plans, and maybe even learn to befriend chaos. We might be less quick to hire fragilista consultants, and more impressed by the ones who told us that the best intervention for the time being would be to do absolutely nothing in order to see how the community might self-organize around the crisis. I’m pretty sure that Jesus was an anti-fragilista. He trusted that there was a natural grace at work, which if you tried to over-manage, (as do most religious authorities), would come back and bite you in the butt.

This is the life of Spirit, random and unpredictable, and yet at the same time, a staggering display of patterned beauty; fragile in that nobody and nothing is getting out of here alive, and yet antifragile, in that this creativity that fashioned a universe and took form in us, is irrepressibly transcending all manner of death and destruction; full of suffering and yet through it all, revealing a Heart that is drawing a universe towards its fulfillment in love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I went to see the “comedy”, This Is 40, written by  Judd Appetow. All comedy is born of tragedy, and tragedy describes the state of marriage as it’s portrayed here. What is played out is the dilemma of what Ken Wilber calls the postmodernist disease of boomeritis revisited upon the Gen Xers.  Every couple in the film is functioning from the level of ego, trying to parent children who act as mirrors for their own galloping narcissism—effectively children trying to parent children. This selfishness extends to the main couple’s respective fathers, who themselves have started their own families as sixty-somethings. One of them, hilariously and tragically played by Albert Brooks, got attracted to a younger woman, agreed to have a child with his new wife, which morphed into in vitro triplets, and there he is, a sixty something man, in debt up to his eyeballs, at home doing his pathetic best to parent triplets, whose names he can’t keep straight. He does not want to be there. Almost makes you weep.

The film ends on a feel good note, but there really isn’t any foundation for the optimism. There is no spiritual development in any of the couples, very little integration of new insight, and no sense that there might be a transcendent point to parenting (or marriage for that matter).

This is a portrait of affluent North Americans trying to figure out what the hell marriage and parenting is all about. We continue to turn out kids, even though the planet needs fewer, not more, humans at this point. We are unconsciously driven by a biological script written by our DNA, teaming up with a cultural field of attraction telling us that we can have it all. It’s a mess. The film, even though it’s a little over the top, does a pretty good job at showing the exhaustion, creeping resentment, fantasies of escape, and general malaise that results in the divorce statistics we see today.

My own parents started having their children in the 1950′s when there was a sense of  mission following the devastating effects upon nations of WW2. The nation was rebuilding, bringing children into the world and providing a “good enough” environment to help them reach adulthood and hopefully repeat the process. It wasn’t exactly a high calling, but it was imbued with an honest recognition that it would require sacrifice. They ended up with six of us little buggers. I know that they wouldn’t have traded us in for all the gold in the world, but they didn’t expect it to be fun. They couldn’t have it all and they knew it. Today, their grandchildren take for granted a level of material comfort and expect a standard of living that is beyond what my parents achieved in their entire lifetime. Progress? Perhaps materially. But that game is good and truly over. Earth can’t sustain it, and the soul isn’t interested.

In the 21st century, our motivation, intentions, and enactment of parenting needs to be in service of a higher purpose. The new evolutionary impulse for parenting is about giving birth and creating the conditions for the emergence of a new kind of human.  This doesn’t mean that we need to be perfect parents (Perfect Madness: Motherhood In An Age of Anxiety), but it does mean that we need to be purposeful parents. And this means, in turn, that we see our role as parents as a sacred vocation.

This needs to be enacted with a mellowness of heart. There is too much earnest parenting going on as it is, too much focus on the child. It is the souls of the parents that are screaming for attention. This narcissistic wound gets salt rubbed in it by the unrelenting attention that children require (or at least which society says they require). In truth, what infants and children need is to connect cleanly, joyfully, and unambiguously with the soul of another who loves them.

“Helicopter parenting” (parents who are physically hyper-present but psychologically and spiritually absent) may be an overcompensation for our own neglected spiritual life. Katie Roiphe, writing in Slate, says that overparenting “is about too much presence, but it’s also about the wrong kind of presence. In fact, it can be reasonably read by children as absence, as not caring about what is really going on with them, as ignoring the specifics of them for some idealized cultural script of how they should be.”

 

For 2000 years we may have missed a central point of  the legend of Jesus’ birth. Mary and Joseph receive their inspiration “from above”, from angels, from the divine Source, from holy priests and priestesses, and from intuitive cousins, informing them that what they were being called to was to enact is the birth of a new kind of human being. (This is couched in the messianic language of Judaism and Christianity, naturally).  By bringing this child into the world they are portrayed as knowingly participating in the enactment God’s will—this one was born to transcend the ethnocentric and religious identity of any particular tribe. S/he would bring light to all the nations and to the ends of Earth (Isaiah 49:6).  The new human would be fully human, fully divine, and give his life to liberate humanity and fulfill creation’s longing.  This is not a calling that our ego (early, biological self) can even hear. “Such knowledge is too high, (we) cannot attain it” (Psalm 139:6). It must be heard at the level of soul.

Imagine that this story is one that we are called, not merely to believe, but to embody.  The legend was born in the place where all sacred myth arises, from the interior depths of its writers, representing an externalization of what was coming in from higher planes of consciousness. The Christmas story is meant to activate a higher level of consciousness around birth—the motivational shift from procreation to conscious co-creation (this includes, of course, but is not limited to, children).

Our planet cannot bear the weight any longer of unconsciously increasing our numbers out of early biological and cultural scripts. No, I’m not talking about us raising little Messiahs. Each child we bring into the world will ultimately be responsible for their own destiny. We need to learn to lean into the wisdom of nature and our essential Nature, and get out of the way of the One coming down and into this magnificent adventure of becoming, through these unique expressions who are our children.

The best that we can do for our children is to refine the instrument of self and the quality of our relationships so that we resonate with deeper, more subtle energies of the soul and spirit. We can prepare for a new birth as though what is involved is an allurement of the right soul to the right time and place. Villages in Africa do this to this day. Upon conception, the village gathers to discern the song of this particular soul, a song that will be sung to her throughout life’s transitions.

For those who are beyond this life stage or choose not to have children, it goes without saying that we are charged with the responsibility, the privilege, and the joy of raising our own cosmotheandric soul to full stature.

(By the way, the film is actually very funny.)

TIP: If you go, stay for the credits.

 

 

 

 

 

This will be the first Christmas Eve in twenty-seven years that I’m not preaching. I confess to not feeling overwhelming grief. It’s a tough gig—almost impossible to pitch the message in a way that is meaningful to this twice a year crowd. Start with the families that show up for the “tradition” and a stocking-full of carols. They want their  gospel preached neat, with none of that watered down liberal contextualizing. Then there are the smug modernists, who’ve taken a Religion 101 course, and know their facts: Jesus was born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem; “virgin” is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for young girl; Herod never really ordered the death of all those male children; the whole birth narrative is a legendary composite created by first century editors. Blah..blah…blah…So, let’s just hear those carols, light a few candles, and get back to the Captain Morgan and eggnog. Finally, there are the enlightened postmodernists, who know that there is no inherent meaning in any of this, except for the particular interpretations we bring to it—your meaning, my meaning, all equal.

Pity the poor preacher. What to do? Tell the story straight up and let the “Gloria, in excelsis deos” carry the day?  Let the modernists know that you know, and spend half your sermon doing exegesis on the difference between Luke and Matthew’s birth narrative? Cater to the postmodernists by reading the scripture, dropping a few deep questions for everyone to ponder in silence as they create their own meaning? (Newsflash, these folks aren’t sitting there pondering all these things with Mary—they  are hoping that somebody makes it go away, fast).  Anyway you slice it, the cynical veteran knows that what they’ve come for is to sing Silent Night to candlelight, hear the organ with all the stops pulled out, and if they are lucky, hear a killer take on O Holy Night.  It’s tempting for the preacher to just fold before the Herculean challenge and toss off that  nugget you preached a few years ago that seemed to get decent reviews. I feel for you. I do.

But damn it all, don’t do it. Don’t give in. Go to the well and come up with something that’s going to snap them out of the Johny Walker-induced haze they walked in with.

Ok, hot shot. What would you do? Well, I’d tell them exactly where I’m at with the story at this point in my life. I’d tell them that human beings possess an endlessly, rich, interior life that is filled with Mystery, ancient archetypes, and burning longing for the future. The problem is that it’s invisible to us and mostly outside our awareness. The only way to actually see it is to see it outside of ourselves first. Let me explain.

Every once in a while someone like a Jesus of Nazareth comes along and wakes us up. He embodies this dimension of wisdom, consciousness, compassion, and the future that is within us all, but couldn’t access. Something in us recognizes the truth. That’s it! He’s it! those first New Testament editors said to themselves. He is the Good News!  And then they created wonderful, glorious stories about his birth, his life, his death, and how even death couldn’t destroy all the creativity and love he represented.

And it’s not that they created these stories arbitrarily. It’s not a question of just “making it up”. Sure, the New Testament writers mined  their own scriptures for details of the narrative. No surprise there. They threw in some angels, because who hasn’t been touched by an angel, in our dreams or in some inexplicable coincident that put our life back on track? They brought in stars because they knew that what was going on in this guy was cosmic in scope and represented some kind of  harmonious convergence of the heavens. Enter the bad guy, Herod, because god knows there’s always a bad guy, embodying a bad system, intent on taking out his rage on the most vulnerable. This Christmas Eve, this guy will be on everybody’s mind.  Who knows where sacred symbols and story lines that compose our myths come from ? It’s a mystery, but my hunch is that it’s from the same storehouse of wisdom that brought forth a universe, latent within each one of us cosmic human beings. Good myths never happened, and yet they are always happening.

Then, once we had these foundational stories in place—like Jesus’ birth story— we spent the next two thousand years allowing this catalytic attractor of a man pull the best theology (the worst would be exposed) and the deepest questions of our soul out into the open. All that latent interiority, the stuff that was invisible, but the most real part of us, comes rushing out as it is projected on to a man like Jesus.  Thank God for humans like Jesus who have the courage to be the presence of what’s coming and pull this stuff out of us.

We asked, how can he be fully human and fully divine? We say, this is the Word made flesh. The Son of God. Smart men gathered from the four corners of Empire and asked how can Christ be con-substantial with the Father and the Spirit, one with and yet distinct? We just let it rip, and if you are one of the people still calling this “dogma”, pejoratively, get over it. Really. Do yourself a favor this Christmas and read some early church fathers, or some wicked feminist theologians. Dig in. This so-called dogma is where the soul wants to sit and feast for weeks. Ok, so Facebook and Twitter have shortened our attention spans to 147 characters and a two minute video. That’s our problem. Really, it is our problem.

And here’s how I’d conclude the sermon.  I believe that every story the church has ever told about Jesus, and every theological riff on him, from the Council of Nicaea and Chalcedon until this moment, has been a projection of our own interior life. Cultural philosopher, Jean Gebser, was one of the first to see that it’s much easier to recognize new facets of reality (that are dormant in what he called the Ever Present Origin), if they first appear as external and objective facts. “Only later in evolution is their source recognized to be within ourselves” (Allan Coombs, The Radiance of Being). The moment that we are able to see clearly the projection, we can be sure of the advent of a new structure of consciousness.

When I say that we’ve projected it all on to Jesus, I don’t mean that it’s a mere fancy, the product of over-active imaginations. The soul of a Jesus actually awakens this dormant wisdom. At first we create the legends, then we literally believe them. This enables us to make what was subjective and invisible, objective and visible. Then, one day we have an epiphany. Holy shit, this question about how Jesus could be fully human and fully divine? It’s actually about me. About us! One with the Father/Mother essentially, and yet distinct? Yep. We’re talking about the mystery of our own essential unitive nature. Jesus as Saviour? It’s a little new agey, but c’mon, it’s true. We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for. The forgiveness of sins? You guessed it. That power is given to us. And then when you read the gospels with this in mind, you get the sneaking suspicion that Jesus was trying to get this through the disciple’s thick skulls at every opportunity. Given that we still don’t get it 2000 years later, perhaps we can give the disciples a little slack.

So, yeah, if I was the preacher, I’d tell the good folks that the Word was made flesh 2000 years ago, and then again on December 24, 2012, in them. I’d tell them that they are the light that no darkness can overcome, that they are the love they’ve been looking for all their lives. I’d send them out to redeem the world in their little neck of the woods—to be the presence of peace when we are all reeling from recent images of unthinkable violence. I’d tell them that if they leave the place without realizing that the Christ is wanting to be born in them, then they’d have let themselves off the hook too easily. And that we’re at a time in history when we can’t afford to let ourselves off the hook. I’d hope as well that we’d have fallen on our knees before Jesus who poured his life and is still pouring his heart out to wake us up to our glorious destiny.