Most spirituality has said, in one way or another, that we have all indeed begun to forget, if not fully forgotten, who we are. Universal amnesia seems to be the problem. Religion’s job is purely and simply one thing: to tell us, and keep reminding us of who we objectively are. Thus, Catholics keep eating "the Body of Christ" until they know that they are what they eat— a human body that is still the eternal Christ. What else would the message be? 11

We live and move in an entirely symbolic universe. Symbols are in fact the only solid way to experience substance. (The Greek root sym-bolon means "a throwing together.") True symbols somehow are the thing itself. Our mind throws together meanings largely without realizing we are even doing it. Poets, artists, and storytellers have always known this, and now scientists are honest enough to realize that they too need metaphors to point to reality (for example, black holes, string theory, and the big bang). 72

Most meaning is largely preconceptual and not subject to words, and in that sense it is nonrational, but meaning lies in wait to appear and grab onto the right symbol in the right moment. 73

Natural symbols, like trees, water, animals, or human nudity, are somehow universal metaphors and work on everybody, even if it is in different ways. Such metaphors "carry us beyond," which is the exact Greek meaning of the word (meta-phore). 74

To say symbols are not true or metaphors are not "real" is just stupid. Sorry if that seems unkind! We live and die for our symbols, because psychic reality is also reality! 75

Religion knew the truth of metaphor and symbol for almost all of history until the past few hundred years, and especially until the wrongly named Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Then we started confusing rational and provable with real. We actually regressed and went backward. In trying to defend its ground in the face of rationalism and scientism, religion tried to become "rational" itself and lost its alternative consciousness, which many of us call contemplation. 75

The Formless One forever takes on form as "Adam" (and in Jesus "the new Adam’ ), and then takes us back to the Formless One once again as each form painfully surrenders the small self that it has been for a while, "I am returning to take you with me, so that where I am you also may be" (John 14:3), says Jesus. The changing of forms is called resurrection, and the return is called ascension, although to us it just looks like death. Buddhists are looking at the same Mystery from a different angle when they say, "Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form," and then all forms eventually return to formlessness (spirit or "emptiness ) once again. This is observable and needs no specific religious label as such. Christians call it incarnation — death —> resurrection — ascension, but it is about all of us, and surely all of creation, coming forth as individuals and then going back into God, into the Ground of all Being. 82

When we take the Resurrection symbol and its substance absolutely seriously, it moves us far beyond the stripped-down literal meaning where both atheists and fundamentalists flounder. It does not even have to mean "eternally enduring life in our current form or even in the future": instead, it might also mean "a present life of eternal significance." 86

Jesus fully accepted and enj oyed his divine-human status. "J and the Father are one," he said (John 10:30), which was shocking to his Jewish contemporaries, for he looked just like one of them, and apparently they did not like themselves. No wonder they called it blasphemy and picked up stones to kill him (John 10:33). You do know, I hope, that it is formally incorrect for Christians to simply say, "Jesus is God," although that is the way they do think. But it misses the major point and goal of the whole incarnation. Jesus does not equal God per se, which is for us the Trinity. Jesus, much better and more correctly, is the union between God and the human. That is a third something—which in fact we are invited to share in. Once we made Jesus only divine, we ended up being only human, and the whole process of human transformation ground to a halt. That is the way the dualistic mind works, I am very sad to say.’ For some of you, these paragraphs could be the most important in this book. 97

Re-ligio ("rebinding, re-ligamenting") is not doing its job if it only reminds you of your distance, your unworthiness, your sinfulness, and your inadequacy before God’s greatness. Whenever religion actually increases the gap, it becomes antireligion instead. Iam afraid we have lots of antireligion in all denominations. | always figured that was the meaning of the very first devil Jesus met and had to exorcise; notice it was living in the synagogue itself (Mark 1:21-28). So I am not talking about the devils of secularism, scientism, or atheism. I am talking about the common blockages and boundary markers inside religion itself—anything 101 Such gap-creating between God and creation is truly diabolical (dia balein, Greek, to throw apart), and he calls it so: "Alas for you hypocrites! You shut up the kingdom of heaven in peoples’ faces, neither going in yourself, nor allowing others to gO in who want to’ (Matthew 23:13). I would surely be afraid and hesitant to say that if he had not said it first. Jesus said it first (and then Paul did) by warning us against any notion of religion as mere laws, requirements, or purity codes. Yet that is where most religion is to this day. We pulled Jesus inside our "conventional wisdom" and seldom allowed him to be the teacher of alternative wisdom that he always has been.’ 101-102

It was St. Irenaeus of Lyon, called the first Christian theologian, who said, "The Son of God was made man so that man might become sons of God."5 103

Before transformation, you pray to God. After transformation you pray through God, as the Christian liturgies always say: "Through Christ our Lord. Amen!" Before radical conversion, you look for God as if God were an object like all other objects. After conversion (con-vertere, to turn around or to turn with), you look out from God with eyes other than your own. As the Dominican, Meister Eckhart put it in one of his Sermons, "The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love."°All humans are doing is allowing God to ~ complete the circuit" within us— until we both see from the same perspective. 106

In fact, Meister Eckhart goes so far as to Say, "A human's best chance of finding God is to look in the very place where they abandoned God."" God is waiting right there in the experience of your falling. 108

Some of the most exciting and fruitful theology today is being described as the "turn toward participation."8 Religion as participation is a rediscovery of the Perennial Tradition that Plotinus, Gottfried Leibniz, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and so many saints and mystics have spoken of in their own ways. It constantly recognizes that we are a part of something more than we are observing something. The turn toward participation now sees that most of religious and church history has been largely preoccupied with religious ideas, about which you could be wrong or right. When it is all about ideas, you did not have to be a part of "it"; you just needed to talk correctly about "it."’ You never had to dive in and illustrate that spiritual proof is only in the pudding. You never have to actually go to Russia; you just need a correct map of Russia and the willingness to say, "My map is better 108 than your map, or, more commonly, "Mine is the only true map, without offering any corroborating evidence that your map has in fact gotten you there.
The spiritual question is this: Does one’s life give any evidence of an encounter with God? Does this encounter bring about in you any of the things that Paul describes as the "fruits" of the Spirit: "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness. gentleness, and self control" (Galatians 5:22)? Is the person or the group after this encounter different from its surroundings, or does it reflect the predictable cultural values and biases of its group?
Or, even worse, does your religion spend much of its time defining and deciding who cannot participate? When there is not much to enjoy from the inside, all you can do is keep yourself above and apart from others. Many groups still "forbid under pain of sin" worshiping God in another denominational space. Please. Such religion is nothing but groupthink and boundary marking, and is not likely to lead you to any deep encounter with God. Such smallness will never be ready or eager for true greatness. 109 108-109

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The reason We have to keep coming back to hurch each Sunday is because last Sunday’s message did not work at any deep level. 121

What most of Christian history did was largely dress up and disguise the Christian False Self. We baptized it, confirmed it, married it, and made Christians go to church instead of realizing they were the church (1 Corinthians 3:17). We often gave "holy communion" to'a self that was largely incapable of much communion,:and.even ordained as priest, minister, bishop, and pope many False Selves who did not even know, and much less know how to enjoy, their True Selves in God. This. deserves Immense sadness and grief, not hatred or disdain, and I hope I am coming across in a constructive way. Nothing less will help. 124

As St. Bonaventure (1217-1274) put it, "[God] is an intelligible space whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.... [God] is within all things, but not enclosed, outside all things but not excluded, above all things but not aloof. below all things but not debased.... [God] is supremely one and all-inclusive, [God] is therefore ‘all in all’" (1 Corinthians 15:28). You can either accuse St. Paul and St. Bonaventure, who is proclaimed a "Doctor of the Church," of pantheism, or admit that we are the ones who do not get it yet. 128

Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and John Duns Scotus taught the same thing clearly and unequivocally: "Deus est Ens," that is, God is Being itself (which is different from saying that God is a Being or all Beings). Being did not just start showing itself with the Hindu scriptures, the Koran, or the Judeo-Christian 130 era. 131 130-131

If it is truth, it has to be true everywhere or it is not true at all, St. Vincent is rightly saying. Such broad, deep, and mystical seeing must not be constricted into denominational "churchiness" or theological wrangling. If it is true, then science, psychology, poetry, and philosophy will also be seeing the same thing, but from different angles, at different levels, and with different vocabularies. We can still use the Vincentian canon and look for truth that is somehow held "everywhere, always, and by all." Perhaps no other generation has been more prepared to do just that than ours—and with solid scholarship and science at our disposal besides. 132

Cosmology is now offering a wonderful, and I do mean wonder-full, reimagining for much of theology. The truth is first of all written in creation itself—our first and primary Bible (Romans 1:19-20). And all of creation is saying from the beginning that things live, and things die, and things live again in new shapes. Christians say, "Christ dies, Christ lives, and Christ comes again," and call it "the mystery of faith." Buedhists point out the same pattern: "Emptiness is form and form is emptiness." We are both saying the same thing, but with different metaphors — ours is Just personal, and theirs is more abstract and philosophical. We are both saying that all things die and change forms, and nothing is permanent in its present state. And now science is saying it too. 133

Science is no longer our enemy; instead quantum physics, biology, and other academic disciplines are revealing science as probably our new and best partner, much better than philosophy ever was. If something is spiritually true, it will also be true in the physical world too, and all religions will somehow be looking at that "one truth" from different angles, goals, assump tions, and vocabulary, as will all of the disciplines of any great university. If we are really convinced that we have the Great Big Truth, then we should also be able to trust that others will see it from their different angles—or it is not a great big truth. 135

Perhaps our cultural icon, Wendell Berry, is a good guide for us at this point. He often says that "the mind that is not baffled is not employed"! The major spiritual problem for many religious people is that they refuse to be baffled for a while. 138

I am aware of the phrase ‘true self" occurring only once in the Bible. Paul uses the words to describe what he is desperately trying to locate in the midst of some major trials with his False Self, and he speaks of it in a telling way: "When I act against my own will, then it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me’ (Romans 7:20). Somehow he knows there is a part of him that is objective, true, and unafraid of death. And then he contrasts that with what we 142 are calling the False Self (7:14-25) and calls it "sin." 143 142-143

C. G. Jung, often very critical of Christianity, said that the "Archetype of the God-Man" (Christ) is a relatively adequate map of the unconscious human journey, and it should not be dismissed until and unless one has walked through it oneself. He feared that Western civilization would lose this map and that it would be quite dangerous and disastrous for us if we let this map wither in our midst. In that sense, we need an effective "Savior who can name and guide us on the necessary path. Without a good map, Jung feared the manipulation, violation, and even "annulment" of the human personality.4 That sounds like an overstatement until you note the hugely destructive isms of our time: totalitarian communism: Nazism, consumerism itself, materialism in general, and what John Paul II called "rigid capitalism," all of which deny many of the essentials of humanness, and often our very core. 146

In all of nature, one form has to die and decay for another to take over, so this pattern should be obvious and clear, although it is largely not — until you really observe or actually study the patterns of almost everything." Again, we appear to be in gross denial. Jesus own dying has to be made quite clear and forthright in the Gospels; in Mark, it is almost half of the text. His "necessary death’ had to be made visible and compelling because we all want to deny death and avoid the obvious. Quite unfortunately, we made 148 Jesus’ necessary dying into a mechanical atonement theory demanded by a "just" God, which had the side effect of keeping the spotlight away from our own necessary dying. Jesus indeed became our scapegoat, but not at all in the way that he intended. Avoiding our own necessary "pattern of dying" (Philippians 3:11), we constructed instead a kind of metaphysical transaction, called "paying the price" or "opening the gates," that was necessary for Jesus to complete. Then we worshiped him for doing this, which is understandable, but. also avoids the point that we all have to pay the price for growing up and for loving, jesus never said, "Worship me," but he often said, "Follow me." We have wasted a lot of good energy on "vicarious substitutionary atonement theories" and created a punitive and petty God in the process—a "Father God" who was incapable of forgiving "without blood.’® Is God that unfree? Remember, the ego likes contests of win and lose and cannot even comprehend anything like win-win. Jesus became our substitute in losing, hoping it would let us off the hook, I guess. Fortunately, we Franciscans never officially believed this common substitutionary atonement theory. We were always a kind of alternative orthodoxy inside Catholicism. In the teaching of John Duns Scotus, 149 Jesus was pure gracious gift, and not necessary at all (John 1:16; Ephesians 1:3—6). God operated out of total and absolute freedom in the gift of Jesus and the Christ to the world.’ Incarnation, the birth in Bethlehem, was already God's unconditional choice and gift of himself to us. Incarnation was already redemption. And why would a free gift be less beautiful than a necessity? Why would an act of violence be necessary to redeem the world? For us, Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity but to change the mind of humanity about God. It is "simple and beautiful;" as Einstein said great truth would always have to be.
This teaching alone made me glad I joined the Franciscans. Jesus’ death was not solving any cosmic problem whatsoever, but revealing to us our own human problem: that we fear, and we kill what we should love. And what do we fear most of all? That death is stronger than love. Jesus in his Cross and Resurrection uncovered and undid both of these lies forever. That is what we are singing about at Easter with all those happy songs about overcoming death. The big pattern leading to transformation or Resurrection says that there is a gate that you must pass through, even though the gate has a thousand forms you must die before you die—and then you will know 150
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