Descend into blessedness, rise to transcendence

In much of the Western imagination, redemption is associated with being risen. The quintessential image most take away from Christianity is the Resurrection, the joyous victory by Christ over a suffering death. I have a different intuition. In the circle of an eternal life, it is my belief that one must very much descend into blessedness, into the rich and fertile earth, into the mind and soul of the Eternal Child. From this sacred and warm place, one is as a seed, drawing in the primordial to grow and spring forth. It is in this seed that one discovers one's soul. It is in this seed that one discovers one is made of the tendril threads of spirit.

Indeed, one can then rightfully ascend in the confidence and wisdom of a human being who knows his or her own origin. There is no sage without the child. There is no transcendence without descent. To take the example that many would choose to ignore, let us visit Jesus' death. A grisly and heart-rending affair, for most. Utterly unredeemable. A tragic day with no comfort, save the hope of resurrection and a Grand Bearing and Atonement for the sins of others. Jesus is primarily seen as a noble victim or a martyr.

And yet look closely. The human and divine in Jesus have an intense and transformative interchange. "God why hast thou forsaken me?," cries the suffering man. In his pain he turned up, stripped of all his defenses, beseeching, in need of love and filled with a pained desire to touch the presence of the holy in his temporally racked body. Then an opening occurred. "God, I commend my spirit to thee," a praise and a recognition of the divine in him already ascending, touching, and conferring itself to its source, its Father of many names, it's Mother of all. And when Jesus had offered up his spirit, consummated in the Grace of God, he said, "It is done." And he died.

The lesson I take is a very different one than most. What I see is the triumph of spirit in the deepest depths of humanity in the conduct of present human life, not simply after it is finished. I see the tragedy of Jesus' death. I understand the rite of sacrifice embodied in the way his life was taken. I see that Jesus died for the sins of humanity. However, I see in his example, that it is in this life that we must open, and allow our own spirits to touch God and the God in one another. In this very most human of all human experiences of tremendous vulnerability and pain, Jesus chose Openness, Questioning, Love, Compassion, Courage, and Giving. He allowed the spirit to evoke through him, and demonstrate to the world the present, actual, and triumphant powers of love.

As he was given (His only begotten), so he gave. As we are given, so shall we give. Life is a miracle, every moment, death an inevitability. What is to give us meaning beyond our small distractions and plays at courage. We cannot seem to accept our own mortality, much less face a most painful torture. We must accept that we cannot know ourselves without descending into our deepest spirit. We cannot know this life without raising that deep spirit up the well to offer a thirsty world. And we cannot know the Eternal without offering ourselves to a Love that ever offers itself to us.

I look at the forms my life has taken, and they appear to have very little rhyme or reason. But I am beginning to see by offering myself, what I may become, indeed realize what I have always been. I journey on.

Anam Cara: Soul Friend

My wife and son are traveling, leaving me time to indulge in my newest favorite author of the moment, John O'Donohue, a wonderful Celtic philosopher and spiritual poet and sage-- Anam Cara; To Bless the Space Between Us; and Conamara Blues. Though I am a practicing progressive Christian, the spiritual language of my soul and my biography could best be described as "naturalistic theism," (with a philosophical and psychological disposition greatly influenced by Mahayana Buddhism) having grown up on a farm with many hours of delight and reflection, quite literally, in the fields of God. John O'Donohue probably comes closer to that than anyone else I have yet read.

"To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together. No one can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of an inner world. This wholesomeness is holiness. To be holy is to be natural, to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you. Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is an artist in this primal and inescapable sense. Each one of us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and shapes a unique world."

"Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and the universe... If approached in friendship, the unknown, the anonymous, the negative, and the threatening gradually yield their secret affinity with us... The Celtic imagination articulates the inner friendship that embraces Nature, divinity, the underworld, and human world as one."

[John O'Donohue, xvi & xvii, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (Anam Cara means "soul friend")]