Notes from stillness

The meeting begins with an experienced member ringing a singing bowl and leading us through a metta meditation. I had never practiced metta before, but I needed the break from my head after spending weeks pounding the theological pavement, trying to figure piece together a framework that, the more I have tried developing the more it seems like pride—building an intellectual Tower of Babel.

God is not sought by the mind. God is not by found by logic.

The singing bell chimes and we seek refuge:

May I be filled with loving-kindness…

May I be safe from internal and external danger…

May I be happy and at ease…

Then I thought of someone I loved.

May you be filled with loving-kindness…

Then I thought of a neutral figure.

May you be filled with loving-kindness…

Then I thought of someone I resent.

May you be filled with loving-kindness…

Then we used our hearts to expand our field to the room, to the community outside the building, to the city, and beyond.

May all beings be filled with loving-kindness…

Then we came back. We were in our bodies. We were in this room. Together.

We shared and someone talked about making amends and how forgiveness restores relations. In that moment it didn’t matter what theory of atonement is correct because it seems like they all have qualities of truth with each composed with degrees of correct. What seems improbable is that it is one or the other and instead it’s a holding the tension between them within us without losing our minds.

Christianity is not an either/or, East/West dichotomous arrangement. Christianity is a faith where the heart is the mooring rope for paradox.

I mean, I’m an alcoholic and in recovery. I’m a paradox. I’m not one or the other, in fact, I can’t be the latter without the former; I can’t step into the latter without the former.

You cannot have resurrection without the crucifixion.

I just want to be a damn theologian, I want to have spiritual insight, I want to wrestle with ontological concepts, but all I can be is a fucking alcoholic. I’m too stupid to realize that even my way of trying to approach God is like an addict.

Trying to find a way to get out of my head, hoping that if I know enough, I’ll just magically be in my heart. But that’s the thing about this faith vs works debate, we’re all just using our heads to talk past each other instead of descending the wizard’s stairs and approaching God with our heart. God may be everywhere present and filling all things, but humans have an almost unfathomable capacity to obfuscate this reality.

The practice of descending into the heart is an act of faith, trusting that God loves us and wants the best for us, then in the heart is where God works in us.

Θέωσις is a divine work, it’s up to us to step into communion with Him through this practice but then in the stillness it is God’s work. There’s no book to read. There’s no recipe. There’s just us and God and His love for us that is realized in our heart. It’s where we wrestle with God and our own humanity, realizing our own hypostasis in the stillness of the heart—becoming like Christ in actualizing our humanity and our divinity, bestowed upon us through baptism.

Baptism is another divine work. All the sacraments are works of God. They’re doing a work in us, granting us deeper and deeper relation with God.

“Newman argues that the Reformers were right in insisting that our justification is wholly the work of Christ. They were wrong in teaching that this righteousness is only imputed to us and not imparted. Christ himself becomes our righteousness. ‘Our true righteousness is the indwelling of our glorified Lord… This is to be justified, to receive the Divine Presence with us and to be made a Temple of the Holy Ghost.’

So Newman can affirm ‘justification comes through the sacraments; is received by faith; consists in God’s inward presence; and lives in obedience.’

This understanding of justification has immediate ethical implications. It makes demands on the believer which we can only with difficulty meet” (Allchin 51, Participation in God).

The sacraments, through the lens of the Oxford Movement shows an apprehension that by participating in them we are, by faith, descending to the heart where God is, and even scarier than that, it’s also where I am.

[Fuck that shit.]

But Christ’s ministry is a practice of being with and if I can’t figure out how to be with myself then how the hell am I going to be with others? It’s the lesson of Christ being led into the desert by the Spirit, showing us two realities while illustrating baptism as a divine work:

1) There are things in this world that are going to keep us distracted from our relationship with God.

2) There are things in this world that are going to keep us distracted from our relationship with ourselves.

This is why the sacraments are non-negotiable in terms of spiritual perfection, because of their divine properties facilitating self-realization. They are energized by prayer where God is doing a work within us in the silent land of our hearts. The work done within us is not for our benefit, alone, because θέωσις—like Zen or yoga—is a practice that begins when we leave our altar or prayer corner.

The Hebrews wandered for forty years maturing spiritually and wrestling with the call to be perfect. This is not a weekend work. It is a process that takes time, space, patience, and it takes allowing God to do a work in us by faith. This is a practice of reorienting our faith toward God, which is opening up to His love, and realizing ourselves through communion with Him. By extension we are practicing being with others.

The sacraments teach us, above all else, that God’ Presence is far nearer than we truly appreciate, and prayer is a practice of being with God, not for His sake but for our sake, coming back into relation with Him. It is all a practice of Presence. God is in the sacraments,

“Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust and may become participants of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).

He is doing a work presently in us when we live sacramentally, the work is energized by prayer which is done as an exercise of a deepening faith, a trust, which is made manifest by our Presence in our own lives. It is a godly Presence. If we are not present in our lives, then the divine work cannot be fulfilled within us. By faith we descend into the heart, trusting that God is with us in our battles with demons and the self; and it is by faith that we practice Presence in our lives, realizing God’s work.

If the idea of θέωσις is becoming like God, then this is a practice of Presence.

The Recovery Dharma meeting opened into sharing after we meditated and read from the Wise Intention section of the book, with someone talking about making amends and how restorative that was for their relationships. Forgiveness restores relationships, but they cannot look the same as they did previously, that is not how forgiveness works: forgiveness restores a relationship into something different and deeper. The relationship and the participants of it are radically transformed by the act. So, not only do I see atonement as a means for God to forgives us our sins, but it is also a way for us to be united with Him in a much deeper way, a spiritually mature way beyond the state of the garden.

Typologically, spiritual perfection in the Christian faith cannot return back to the state of innocence of Eden. It does not work that way, we are not going backwards and realizing the state of Adam. We are going forward, warts and all.  

The Tanakh in this sense is a narrative presenting a people grappling with perfection and due to their spiritual maturity falling short time and time again but seen throughout the Hebrew Bible is that God’s mercy and promise remains with them. In a lot of ways, we can apply the progression of the Hebrew peoples forming their religious tradition from Ur to Jerusalem as our own microcosmic maturation in the process of θέωσις, becoming fully realized through the Incarnation, Christ’s death, and His resurrection.

This approach to θέωσις is recovery, because through recovery we recognize that our becoming is informed by our life with active addiction and that without going through that embodied fallen nature we could never have fully realized a state of self, such as the one found in recovery.

It is a greater state than where we were before addiction took over our lives where we are always practicing recovery, truly moving glory to glory, through spiritual spheres previously unattainable to us before descending to such a broken state. Both Judaism and this approach to θέωσις is reminiscent of the Japanese art known as Kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with golden seams; our broken nature is redeemed and tells a story of redemption, just like Christ’s showing His wounds after His resurrection.

The crucifixion then, does not have to be one theoretical event or another—it is all of them, together, united by the Incarnation. God tramples down death by death; God shows us a perfect example of life and death by Christ’s sacrifice. God forgives us our sins.

It is not an either/or.

God has faith in us which is why He sent His Son to live and die and live again, for us.

It is a perfect faith that God exhibits through the Incarnation and His sacraments. It is a loving Father Who is helping us mature, spiritually, since the beginning of time and space. This is all calling for restoration because it relational. God’s faith and His works are relational. By exercising our own faith for God and opening up to His works we come into relationality by participation in Him.

We are becoming Presence.

If we embody the gift of grace bestowed on us by God, whether imparted, infused, or imputed then we become God’s Presence in our lives. This is θέωσις and my head could not understand that it is not about what you know or how well you can do this or that, maybe it’s the addict in me, maybe it’s the perfectionist, but I can’t help but remain in the wizard’s tower, studying and researching right worship, right theory, right facts, right, right, right, but did we learn nothing from chaos magic? Belief is not a tool that helps us get somewhere, in fact, we’re not supposed to go anywhere.

The question is: how open we are to confronting the Present moment? Can we give up control to let God do a work within us through our participation in Him?

Can we do battle with our demons?

Can we realize our humanity by faith?

If we need faith to be a Christian than that is a faith that comes from our hearts, because faith is to love.

Faith in Christ crucified is not simply acknowledging the reality of the Man from Galilee being executed by the State. It is faith in Christ’s participation in our lives and in our death, no matter where we are so is God which is why we—by faith—trust in God and have no fear of death. God is there, too.

The crucifixion is indicative of our participation in God the same way that God condescended to be like us, we condescend to become like Him. We enter a deep, self-giving love with God because of faith where God may do His divine work, restoring us both into right relation to one another.

This is the spirit of true Christianity: the Way.

It sucks, it is challenging, it’s beautiful, and it’s really scary, but God is with us.

I take refuge in that.

Si comprehendis, non est Deus