Sunday, May 20, 2012

Guided Meditation On Oneness


Text:  John 17: 11-19

    Sometimes called the other Lord’s Prayer, today’s Gospel reading from John includes Jesus’s remarkable prayer that we become one just as Jesus and the Holy Parent to whom he prayed were one.  “Holy Father,” he prayed, “Protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
        But before we talk about the oneness we experience in Christ, let’s first admit that unity—a misunderstood and incomplete unity—has often produced disunity.  To pugnaciously proclaim “United we stand; divided we fall” is to envision and perpetuate a partial unity at best.  When a group aims to unite, that unity can be created from energy that opposes another group.  Our group-ness can be built defensively upon suspicions of another group. Parts of the Bible ring with this kind of tribalism, even in the Gospel of John. It’s us versus them alright.
        But not here.  Not in this passage.  And not in the overarching Jesus message.  
        John’s Jesus is God’s gift for the whole world—according to John 3:16.  “For God so love the WORLD. . . .” We cannot love one person authentically unless we love all. To love God, to love oneself, and to love one’s neighbor is one indivisible task, say the other Gospel writers.
        That’s why we at Open Table do not want to unduly emphasize—as cozy as it would feel—the oneness we experience when we gather here.  We rightly celebrate our kindredness and the warmth of this particular fellowship only when we bear in mind that the Open Table must always remain open and that getting too satisfied with those already here is antithetical to our call.
        Furthermore, we live in Christian oneness only when, ironically, we do not limit that oneness to fellow Christians. 
        That’s because if our sense of oneness is based on the way Christ makes all one, then ALL divisions fall away and we see our connectedness to everyone and every thing.  Christian spirituality is not about solidifying Christianity; it’s about increasingly experiencing a uniting Spirit that includes every thing. 
        Some relatively recent versions of Christianity have emphasized individualized salvation that promises an evacuation plan for the chosen few to a gated community called Heaven.  These Christians believe entrance to heaven requires that we believe certain things to be true.
        But originally the saving work of the cosmic Christ was understood as happening by connection, integration, and transformation of families, communities, systems. To reconcile, to reunite in this saving way—at the personal, societal, planetary, and cosmic level—requires an emphasis on belonging rather than believing, which requires fundamental empathy. 
        Compassion, not doctrine, is Jesus’ spiritual path we follow.  And compassionate empathy for the other is at the core of all the great religions’ teachings.  Increasingly we are recognizing that “what we do to others is what we do to ourselves” and “the way we treat the cosmos is the way we treat ourselves” (Newell 123)[i]
        But, regrettably, our individual lives feel fragmented, pulled as we are in a thousand different directions.  Your thoughts and mine are continually interrupted, our actions are disunited, our relationships are riven, our souls feel drawn and quartered every day, every day—as technology and competing allegiances and undisciplined habits claim pieces of us.  Where do I need to put my energies on this day?  How do I meet tomorrow’s infinite demands?  Who am I really—when I’m parceling out myself in dribs and drabs to so many people and groups and ideologies?  Where’s the unifying center?  
        Likewise, our communal lives are divided because groups of friends and the church itself and the country in which we live and the physical planet on which we depend seem to be breaking asunder. Nothing is more painful than seeing family bonds break, feeling friendships split apart, watching churches implode over silly disagreements, observing a nation polarize as public discourse becomes more extreme and uncivil, observing planetary resources scooped up by some to the exclusion of others. 
        I invite you into a period of guided prayer based on an important theme Karen Armstrong develops in her recent memoir, The Spiral Staircase.  She describes that, during a period in her life when she still self-identified as an atheist, she came to realize while writing a book on Islam that by making “a constant, imaginative attempt to enter empathically into the experience of another” she came to believe that at the heart of all religious teachings is that necessity of giving up our ego, our selfish concerns, to become “sensitive to the needs of others.” Thus the “spiritual human being is born.”
        I invite you to join me in a spiritual exercise.  I invite you to stretch your spiritual imagination and cultivate empathy in this guided meditation:
1.   Begin by imagining that your life is suddenly bound up with another person whom you don’t particularly like or whom you don’t know well, someone you really would not choose to spend the day with. Picture that person. And now imagine that all his or her heartaches and struggles are suddenly yours, that everything that happens to him or her, happens to you, and that you can see into this person’s heart and mind and really know and feel what he or she knows and feels—and likewise, she or he knows your thoughts and feelings. If that happened, how would that change you?  Imagine how differently you would feel and behave if suddenly you had this deep understanding, this intense connection, this oneness with this other human being. 

2.   Next imagine some aspect of nature that you take for granted every day:  the oak tree in your front yard, the creek that runs behind your house, the wasps that are building a nest under the eaves of your house.  If your health and very life were tied directly to this creature’s health and life—how would your actions change? Would you live your life any differently?

3.   Finally, imagine that you are not a separated, individuated being at all but are in fact a unique but integral member of a far greater and eternal reality than you can know.  Imagine that you contribute in essential ways, yet this reality is so much more than what you are and what you can even imagine the totality to be.  This ultimate reality is infinitely loving and life-giving. Imagine being part of all that.  Now don’t just imagine it; consider that it is actually true.  And there is nothing that can ever separate you from being a part of that larger enterprise of love and life.  If you accept your place in an eternally loving universe, how do you regard yourself and your future?    
. . .
        Richard Rohr talks about a “spiritual ecology”—a way to capture the expansiveness of this saving spirituality that is not limited to beliefs or even to practices but an entire system of relationships and an overarching wholeness we inhabit.  He says, “If you live in a fully connected world, you’re saved every day, just by playing your part.  You are grabbed by God; and you belong to this universe, along with everything else.”  Rohr describes his fascination with the Celtic knot, used so often in Celtic Christianity on the island of Iona, the community that, by the way, composed the songs for our new songbook.  Rohr explains the Celtic knot, found on crosses, gravestones, jewelry, is that culture’s artistic expression that “all is connected, everything belongs, all is one in God.  They knew about ecosystems long before we did, but in an even larger way.  ALL was held together inside the divine knot.”  Then he quotes T. S. Eliot (who quotes Julian of Norwich):
        “And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well / When the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire.”

        Look at the Celtic knot printed in your bulletin.  Look back at the picture on the front of your bulletin: George Tooker’s painting called “The Embrace of Peace,” which seems, to me, a human Celtic Knot.  Contemplate these images of our oneness in Christ.
. . .
        We are learning, you and I, to see our interdependence and wholeness, this oneness within the heart of God to whom Jesus prayerfully entrusted his followers, this oneness which is at the heart of our spiritual quest.


[i] Newell, John Philip.  A New Harmony: The Spirit, the Earth, and the Human Soul.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011.t

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