Epistle for Holy Cross Sunday 6 September 2020

 Philippians 2:5-11

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God

as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death—

even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him

and gave him the name

that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue should confess

that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

Reflection       Jesus’ decision to enter Jerusalem, host a farewell supper with his closest friends, and allow one of them to betray his whereabouts to his persecutors is not a personal decision. He does not act to insure his security, safety, esteem, power or control. Jesus’ action is not personal. It is transpersonal.

An individual who operates with a transpersonal mindset is one "in which the sense of identity or self extends beyond the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind…..”*  The transpersonal perspective is integral and undivided, it recognizes and honors all of humankind as interconnected and interdependent.

Jesus is operating from a transpersonal perspective. Standing surely in this inclusive view Jesus is faithful to truth as he knows it. He claims his nondual birthright as the son of humanity and the son of God. Political and religious officials call this treason and blasphemy. Jesus calls it truth. He is willing to  give up his life rather than give up his truth. 

Right about now you may be thinking, “That is great for Jesus but what does it have to do with me? Jesus’ capacity to seek justice and love unconditionally is unparalleled. I cannot compare to that.”

Wait a minute. Can you hear Jesus’ words to the disciples challenging our smallness? “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these…” (John 14.12) 

I believe we humans have set the bar too low. As it is with every generation, we are meant to exceed the good done by those who have gone before us. “How,” you ask? Fortunately St. Paul has a succinct instruction for the Philippians and us, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus…” 

What is the mind of Christ? It is the transpersonal point of view that sees every person and all of creation as sacred, interconnected  and interdependent. Furthermore, the mind of Christ compels action aimed at what is right.

When Paul counsels us to put on the mind of Christ, he is imploring us to grow beyond our small self’s demands that we strive to insure our personal needs for security, safety, attention, affection, power and control. He is admonishing us to live as Christ lived; engaging life from a transpersonal perspective, patiently and practically taking care of other peoples’ needs, even to the point of sacrifice. 

Which brings us to a perplexing paradox. When we sacrifice for the good of others, we lose nothing. We are not debased or shamed. Rather, we are stretched beyond the ordinary bounds of human understanding, we are raised into the transpersonal experience of glory, honor and triumph. 

This is the mystifying paradox of the cross. When Jesus allows himself to be bound, nailed and raised up on the cross he is not raised to shame and humiliation. He is raised to glory, honor and triumph; he ascends to victory and proceeds to breed hope in our hearts.

We have set the bar too low, made ourselves too small. What if we stood in our place with Jesus and claimed our birthright as children of humanity and children of God? What if we raised our sights to transpersonal heights and  doubled down on our commitment to action aimed at what is right, even when it means personal sacrifice? What might our world look like then?

If you found this post to be meaningful please share by clicking on icons below. Thank you. 

¹ Walsh, R. and F. Vaughan. "On transpersonal definitions". Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. Vol. 25, No2, pp. 199-207, 1993.

Gospel text for Sunday 19 August 2018

John 6:51-58        Jesus said, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

Reflection      Jesus is adding a dimension of nourishment, spiritual nourishment, to our diets. He never says, “Don’t eat bread made with yeast or meat or vegetables.” In fact, his messages is quite the opposite. When your body is hungry, feed it even if it means picking grain on the Sabbath or eating food that is reserved for the priests. Take care of your physical body AND take care of your Spiritual body. 

Everything about the revelation of Jesus is both - and or non-dualistic. First and last, new and old, one and many, body and spirit, mortal and immortal, human and divine. Much as we need to supply nourishment to our bodies so too must we provide nutrition to our Spirits.  

Bread is not a symbol that signifies or represents something else; a cross, star of David, red circle with a diagonal line across it. Bread is a sacrament. Its life sustaining property renders it naturally sacred. When Jesus aligns himself with “living bread” from heaven he is saying, “The message I bring is of a Spiritual nature intended to nourish your Spiritual life.”  

During his final meal with his friends Jesus speaks words that we hear during our celebration of Holy Eucharist. “Whenever you eat this bread and drink this wine, remember me.”  Let us not forget that Jesus blesses, breaks and shares bread in the context of a meal with his friends. Meals are occasions in which we all participate, meals that consist of both the bread of earth and the bread of heaven. Meals are everyday life, the context in which the realization of our Spiritual lives occurs. **

Jesus reveals a way of life that transcends separation of the secular and the sacred. He shows us The Way to live that is essential to our flourishing. Jesus does not instruct us to “Think about this bread and what it means.” He invites us to “eat this bread” because it is not about understanding all of this, it is about doing it. Jesus is inviting us to incorporate the fullness of our divine humanity, our human divinity.

Like Jesus, we are bread made of two ingredients, the physical and the Spiritual. Inevitably our physical beings are challenged, diminish and die. If the only way we find meaning and value is through our effectual actions and avoiding the annihilation of our small selves, well, all that remains for us is to become stale, moldy and disintegrate. Only when we receive, consume and embody the bread as revealed in Jesus are the physical and Spiritual possibilities of life unleashed in us.

If we do not eat, we do not live. That statement is as true with regard to our physical lives as it is for our Spiritual lives.  When we hear John’s Jesus say, “I am the living bread that comes down from heaven…” he is telling us that he brings to us that which we require to nourish our spiritual lives. If we do not eat of this Spiritual bread our Spirits will not flourish. 

IF you found this post to be meaningful please share by clicking on icons below. Thank you. 

** For more on this nondual perspective listen to Fr. Thomas Keating speaking about “The Little Way of St. Teresa of Liseaux”  at https://youtu.be/7wBBOAORoSY

Gospel text for Sunday 22 September 2013

Luke 16:1-13

Jesus said to the disciples, "There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, `What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.' Then the manager said to himself, `What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.' So, summoning his master's debtors one by one, he asked the first, `How much do you owe my master?' He answered, `A hundred jugs of olive oil.' He said to him, `Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.' Then he asked another, `And how much do you owe?' He replied, `A hundred containers of wheat.' He said to him, `Take your bill and make it eighty.' And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.

"Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth."

Reflection    Some say this is Jesus’ ‘hardest’ parable, by which I presume they mean, the most inscrutable. Most agree if you focus on the first part, the manager appears to be the hero but if you consider the entire text he seems more the villian. Good or bad, black or white, here we go again, locked into dualistic thinking. But is this the mind of Jesus? I don’t think so.

The thing about Jesus is he confounded the people of his time and continues to confound us because we are captives of our judgments, our dual thinking minds. Jesus refuses to allow us the simplicity of tying things up in neat little packages of right or wrong, good or evil. Jesus’ point of view, which we may well call the Mind of Christ, understands that we cannot grasp the infinite from our limited rational perspectives. So Jesus tells us stories that muddle our minds.... and that is a good place from which to start. We must admit, we do not ‘get it.’

Our habit of dual thinking is based on judgment, this is black or this is white, this is up or this is down. Nondual thinking, or the mind of Christ, understands that life explodes in countless shades of grey and that up or down makes no sense once we leave the tiny sphere of earth’s gravity and enter infinite space. Stretched beyond our small self perspective we realize that truth is a matter of perspective and no one person can be the judge of that. 

I believe Luke included this disjointed and incomprehensible series of statements at precisely this point in Jesus’ story intending to confound any of us who think we can grasp and package the mystery that is Jesus the Christ and the hidden wisdom of God’s kingdom. Our starting, middle and ending place needs to be, “I don’t know. It is not possible for me to grasp the unborn, undying, eternally present Presence.” That’s it; it is not all about me and what I do or do not like or judge to be so!

This means I set aside my desire to be right, to know, to be in control. This means I admit there are things I do not know. Recently a friend described his encounter with it this way. A wise teacher once asked him, ‘What percentage of all that is known about the world and the universe do you know?’” He responded, ‘Three percent.’ The teacher replied, ‘I believe that is generous, but I will give it to you. Now, in what will you find your life, the three percent you know or the ninety-seven percent you do not know?’ My friend gulped. He spent the next thrity odd years discovering the freedom of not knowing and not having to be right. 

What about the manager in Jesus’ story? I suspect he was a little bit hero and a little bit villian, a smathering of good and a dollop of evil and a whole lot more than I will ever know. Finally I can set this text aside and stop prodding myself to figure it out and tell you the truth about it. I don’t know.

Did you enjoy this post? Please share it by clicking on the icons below. 

PS you can watch an amazing video of zero gravity at http://vimeo.com/29017795