Do not be mistaken: God is not contained within the church – inside its walls or any of the structures the church has put forth to try and capture God’s essence. God may be there at the church building if you carry God there with you inside yourself. Or God may be noticeably (or not so noticeably) absent. God comes and goes as God pleases, so there are many places you might find God.
I’ve had some things on my mind for a while, so I thought I better write them down. I’ve come to believe prayer is just learning to be open. It is not about saying anything or changing anything. It’s about learning to open yourself and practice intimacy. I’ve spent a lot of time exploring my inner world and realize now that it was all so I could learn to let God in. And if you do that, you will soon learn to let others in. The whole goal then is to provide space (“hospitality”) inside for everything you are going to experience in your life.
When we are so caught up handling sin, peddling forgiveness, and getting people into heaven, we forget that Jesus was also a great non-dual teacher. His teaching was revelatory, revolutionary and bewildering. Sometimes we think his teaching was merely a secondary part of his life, like “while I’m here to save everybody from their sins, I might as well say some stuff.” I don’t think we have to determine if one was more important than the other. What Jesus was teaching was very much in line with who he was and what he did – die to self, turn the other cheek, the lucky ones are the poor and meek. What he said and his life and death were a cohesive package.
It is difficult to understand people sometimes. Some people rub you the wrong way, but if you sit in the same space with anyone long enough seeking only to understand them, it will be hard to continue holding them in contempt. Of course, it depends on your stance. If you really want to hold them down in contempt, you will find reasons. It’s an orientation of your heart to attempt to understand and love someone you would have otherwise written off and walled off.
One more spiritual practice with which to reckon is the practice of surrender. This may be the most far-reaching and sophisticated part of the spiritual life. It appears there are a million ways we can practice surrender. We can probably be practicing it at all times in all circumstances. Surrender is allowing ourselves to be subject to and even overwhelmed at times by what is happening to us, without wrestling to assert our will on others and our environment. We may think of surrender as “letting go,” letting our guard down, being receptive or just no longer believing in and relying on our own power. It also may be the most difficult of the spiritual exercises. It goes against our normal, natural instincts to stand up for ourselves, fight for our own rights and win.
As I outline some foundational spiritual practices, I think it is important to note that I tend to approach the spiritual life from an utilitarian perspective. Rather than attaching myself to specific prescribed rituals from specific traditions, I try to abstract the meaning and essence from some common spiritual practices and reduce them down to their most translatable forms. I believe spiritual practices should be repeatable and customizable to many different lifestyles – not prescribed, rigid or ritualistic. To me, a successful teacher conveys “the idea” and allows the student to find ways to apply it in various settings. Therefore, the ideas and concepts to which I continually return are general practices which are hopefully adaptable to diverse lifestyles and traditions, even to people of different faiths or who do not subscribe to a particular faith at all.
Creativity is the only thing. We all enter these states of confusion, disrepair and darkness at times. These can be particularly distressing if you don’t know what they’re about – what you can mine from them or what their meaning is in your life. But the secret is in the sauce: making sense of and meaning of your brokendownness. It’s about what beauty you can make from the ugliness, the despair. All beauty emerges from darkness. What else is life about?
And I wonder if this broken-down-ness is supposed to be. Everything created enters a state of disrepair at times. Your car breaks down – you kind of expect that, but there’s brokenness in the natural world, too. Sometimes things do not work just right. Babies are born with deficits. There is disease in the human body, and turmoil among people and wildlife alike.