God is the Ground

In the 14^th century, Norwich was the second largest city in England, after London. The Bubonic Plague, a pestilence of Biblical proportions, had killed half its residents. Surviving the Plague, and shaped by unimaginable loss, a woman known to us only as Julian of Norwich lived a quiet life as an anchoress to a convent—a lay contemplative committed to solitude, liturgy, and prayer. This life apart from traditional societal demands afforded her the opportunity to write, a rare occupation for any woman at that time. Her writings, eventually released a few centuries later, made her the first published female writer in English history.

            Today the mystical writings of Julian of Norwich are known the world over, especially to anyone interested in the startling intersections between Christian mysticism and the nondual wisdom traditions of the East. And they constitute a grand departure from the more punitive and male-centric theology of her Christian contemporaries.

            In mainstream 14^th century Christianity, God was seen as a cosmic judge and punisher, dividing the damned from the saved. Sin was the great failing that separated us forever from God’s love. But in Julian hands, this paradigm is subverted. Our essential human nature, she argues, exists completely within God. Separation is impossible. Sure, sin is still a problem, and it causes most of our pain, but it’s a problem God has already solved. God’s delight is our liberation. And for Julian, God is simply another word for all that is. “Everything that is, has its being through the love of God,” she wrote. In her mystical visions or “showings,” she experienced Jesus saying, “All will be well and all will be well and every kind of thing shall be well.” No matter how bad things seem, we are already past the place where our problems have power. We just have to realize it.

            For Julian, God is more a presence than a person, a metaphysical reality in which we are already enfolded. When the apostle Paul said that God is where “we live and move and have our being,” (Acts 17:28), he was prefiguring a stance Julian would often express. “God is nearer to us than our soul,” she wrote, “for He is the ground in which it stands.” Like Christian mystics before and since, Julian sees God not as a transcendent being above and outside us, but as the very fabric of reality itself. God then is not to be sought, but simply allowed.

            The extent to which this perspective aligns with the Eastern wisdom traditions cannot be overstated. In the non-duality of the Vedanta school of Hinduism, and in Buddhism, the spiritual path is framed not as a process of becoming something we’re not, but a process of awakening to what we already are. And what we are is part and parcel of the oneness that encompasses all energy, matter, and consciousness. Realization is more a process of subtraction than addition, of removing hindrances rather than adding ornamentation. Our spiritual practices work best when they don’t clutter us up with more information, but dissolve our old ways of thinking.

            And it is from the intersections of Western and Eastern mysticism that New Thought was born in 19^th century America. Across the spectrum of expression in the Unity Movement, Religious Science, and the rest, we see again and again this ancient impulse, that we already are what we seek, and that our longing for God is God’s longing for Itself.

[This piece first appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the May/June 2024 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission. This is my final column for Unity Magazine.]

Love is the Mystery

There is a higher reality that words, concepts, and sermons can’t reach. We try to
point to this reality with carefully wrought language, theology, and doctrine, but the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The map is not the place. The menu is not the food.

For those of us who teach, preach, and write this news is somewhat deflating. We thought we were getting close to naming the mystery. But in the end, all we can do is cultivate in others a willingness to deepen into the mystery that wells up through the cracks of their own lives. This is why Buddha simply held up a flower and didn’t say a word. This is why Lao Tzu wrote that “Those who say don’t know, and those who know don’t say.” Even Jesus seemed exasperated as he chastised his disciples in chapter thirteen of the Gospel of Thomas. “I am not your teacher,” he said. “Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring I have tended.”

If the teacher is not the message, and if the message cannot be received second-hand, then why do we gather in spiritual community to hear sermons about how to better ourselves and draw closer to the sacred source? As a guy who often gives those sermons, this strikes me as a particularly urgent question. What, in the end, are spiritual teachings for? Why do we need any of this?

You might as well ask a tree why it leans toward the sun. We love language, talking, and teaching because concepts are what we know. They’re how we know. In a way, they feed us.

First we perceive the world, then shape those perceptions into thoughts. As Adam named the animals, we name the concepts taking up residency in our consciousness, even going so far as to order them into hierarchies, because with naming comes judgment, prejudice, and bias. There is no such thing as value-neutral thought. We fall asleep and forget that we do not know the world as it is—we know only our thoughts about the world. This dynamic leaves us vulnerable to self-aggrandizing narratives that lionize us while diminishing the other. Prejudice seems baked into cognition itself.

Our innate need to discriminate and ascribe hierarchies must be deliberately disrupted and discarded. The good news is that the deeper part of us already knows this. Beneath the conceptual realm there is a concept-free field of awareness unbound by the limitations of thought. The world’s wisdom traditions call it by many names—Atman, Buddha-mind, spirit, inner Christ—and it is our essential nature. We have our being there. The conceptual mind is ill-equipped to experience this deeper reality. Realizing one’s sacred nature is more a process of  unlearning, of getting out of our own way. No matter how Herculean the effort, how can you become what you already are?

One of the most notable hallmarks of awakening is humility. Less and less do you need to prove that you are right. You recognize that every religion is true—that they all work, like maps, to show the way home. You stop straining and start softening. Freedom replaces fear and anxiety. You no longer argue about the meanings of words. All of the names of God are fine. Or none at all. In the end, only one word—love—serves us best as the name of the nameless mystery that we are. 

[This piece was first published in my A to Zen column in the March/April 2023 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Still Water Runs Deep

 When water courses through a narrow passage it speeds up. When the canyon opens into a wide valley, then an open meadow, the water slows to stillness – the river becomes a lake.

            So too when we rush about on our important errands, crushing our to-do lists like a boss, something is lost.

            The narrower and more constrained our lives become, the more turbulent the course of our thought-stream. Only in the stillness of contemplative prayer, meditation, or restful pause do we root back down into the ground of being, instead of skittering across life’s surface – unsure where we’ve been, unclear where we’re going, and never knowing why.

            Without periods of stillness, all movement becomes meaningless. As Mozart said, “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.”

            This is why, after over a year of pandemic quarantine, cooped up in our home offices and narrow routines, our morning and afternoon walks took on such sacred significance. To be out under a wide open sky, knowing that the stars arch over us like a jeweled lattice, obscured by the midday sun, then emerging one by one as night turns the sky indigo denim, then black velvet. So too the glare of busyness blinds us to the unfathomable beauty ever-present.

            Truth is never far away. We’re simply paying attention to the wrong things. We don’t have a proximity problem – we have a perception problem.

            It is time to recommit to our contemplative prayer and meditation practice. Taking our cue from nature, we see that all things turn through cycles of decay and regeneration, silence and sound, darkness and light. So too we spend long hours of each 24 hour cycle completely unconsciousness, unaware of our surroundings. And it is through the long, fallow night that our mind-body restores itself to newness. Following this model, may we learn to better step outside the stream of busyness that threatens to drown us in its lifeless undertow and instead, climbing out onto the warm, flat rocks midstream, rest in the sun, and simply be. Nothing less than heaven itself awaits in the gaps between each harried thought.

            I think we are simply afraid – afraid to fully trust ourselves. That’s why we rush about in search of the next answer, the next church, the next coach, or the next book. Fear drives us like a lash. Instead, coming into a rare and unrehearsed intimacy with our innermost depths, we find a rest so complete, so natural, and so healing that we wonder what we were ever afraid of. The mystics of all traditions tell of this inner space, this boundless realm beyond all doctrine, dogma, theology, and belief – a place of nameless wisdom and voiceless song. What we hear and know there can never be brought to the surface. The formless cannot take form. But we can be in-formed by it. It leaves a mark. We carry its scent into the activities of our ordinary lives. The only word that even comes close for this transformative knowing – love – sounds tinny and trite in the cacophony of the marketplace. Oh, that cliché, they say. We simply smile. Yeah, we know. So it’s better to say nothing at all, letting our actions do the talking. As Jesus told his disciples in the days before his death, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35 NRSV)

[This piece first appeared in my "A to Zen" column in the July/August edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproducted here with permission.]

The Pathless Path

             In my many years in and around the edges of the New Thought movement, Unity in particular, I’ve noticed something: We feel a bit like a refugee camp. So many of us have come from other religious perspectives, sects, and movements – former Catholics, Protestants, Jews, agnostics, atheists, and more. We went wandering and ended up here…for now. Something about the non-dogmatic openness of New Thought felt like a safe haven in a world where partisan and sectarian chest-thumping rends peaceful hearts into tatters.

            Here, finally, was a religion for people who didn’t really like religion.

            It turned out it wasn’t a different or better religion we were after – we were after an experience, not an ideology. We wanted the nameless mystery and boundless peace beyond all the names of God. As Stephen Mitchell’s rendering of the 131^st Psalm puts it: “My mind is not noisy with desires, Lord, and my heart has satisfied its longing. I do not care about religion or anything that is not you.”

            I came to New Thought as a philosophy student writing my master’s thesis on Ralph Waldo Emerson. But I didn’t set foot inside a Unity Church until middle age, decades later. Emerson’s nature mysticism and unaffiliated spirituality kept me on the outskirts of any organized movement. I preferred the squawking of a jay from the boughs of a sugar pine to any Sunday sermon.

            The traditions that spoke to me most clearly were Asian traditions – Daoism, Vedanta, Zen Buddhism. There I felt the nameless draw of the pathless land of the soul. The silence of meditation seemed to hold more truth than any doctrine or belief, no matter how eloquently stated or ardently held. Maybe it was just my philosophical training, which taught me to love questions and distrust answers.

            Still, in the family of New Thought I found a sangha, a community of fellow-wanders. If you’re going to make a nest in the tree of mystery, it’s good to have a flock around you.

            My Unity teachers – Rev. Will Newsom, Rev. Wendy Craig-Purcell, and many others – taught me with their focused presence and loving kindness that there was something I had been missing all those years out on my own. And the New Thought community, being as it is nominally Christian, opened that door for me – a door I had studiously avoided. Sure, in college I devoured the Christian mystics because there I found brothers and sisters in mystery. But ordinary, everyday Christianity with its emphasis on the redemptive power of the risen Christ never spoke to me. Until my immersion in New Thought, where I eventually came to appreciate the Christian narrative as yet another metaphor for the perennial philosophy: Here was yet another dying, gift giving god, another incarnation – the eternal, sacred, formless source taking form in the temporal world of impermanence.  

And that if you want to know God, look no further than where you are, and who you are. 

            I’m still not a very good joiner. No matter where I am, I’m an outsider looking in. But I’m eternally grateful for my time in New Thought, and for all the glimmers of truth it has shown me.

            But today I think I’ll go hiking with Li Po, the 8^th century Chinese poet: “The birds have vanished into the sky, and now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.”

 [All quotations are from Stephen Mitchell’s The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry.]

[This piece was first published in my A to Zen column in the May/June 2021 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

The Mothers of God

I language the world for a living. And though I hate to admit it (because it’s bad for business) it really can’t be done. As a writer, lecturer, and singer-songwriter, my entire career has been a quixotic battle to achieve the impossible. I strive to express what cannot be expressed. I oversell and under-deliver every single day.

            And yet I keep trying. Because you get close. Once in a while you pierce the fog with the bright shard of an idea, a fortunate turn of phrase, an apt metaphor. You get close to naming the mystery. You almost sing truth. But stepping off stage you know you missed it. Your old friend disappointment comes to visit. You didn’t get it, not really. But on the calendar a string of speaking events, concerts, and writing deadlines loom before you, like downstream towns on a river journey – chances to try again. You’ll do better next time.

            I guess all work is like this. Raising children, starting a business, writing books, mastering any craft. You begin with the end in mind, or at least what you imagine the end to be, and you get busy. But you don’t really know what you’re doing, or where this is all going, or what value any of it will have. You have nothing to guide you but your gut sense that this is worthwhile, that it matters, that it will somehow help others meet their own nameless needs. Because that is one thing you do know – that all work is service, that we are all here to play our part in a symphony of infinite complexity and breathtaking beauty. Seen this way, life begins to shimmer with significance, and you begin to see your choices as instruments wielded not by your narrow self-interest but by the cosmos itself. It no longer feels like you alone are doing this. It’s more like you are being led or called or compelled by something not you. Maybe the way we show up and offer our gifts is how the universe shows up and offers its gifts. Everything in the foreground is the mouthpiece through which the background depths speak. When you get out of your own way your true voice emerges.

            When you begin to understand this better, you begin to relax. You let go of the illusion of control and you renounce the need to be perfect. You know that who you are, how you are, and what you are is enough. And with a sense of play you go about improving your work in a thousand little ways, not because what you did last time was lousy – it wasn’t – but because something better is trying to emerge through you, as you. And who are you to interfere with that?

            It’s liberating to know that you don’t have to have all the answers before you begin. It’s inspiring to know that your own nameless longing is the same nameless longing that courses through everything. And it’s empowering to know that our private suffering connects us to one another in a web of what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “inter-being.” We are never alone. There is no such thing as alone.

            As we deepen into the realization that our yearning is not a private pang of deficiency, but the cosmos longing to give birth to itself through us, we surrender, let go, smile, and shift into optimism and wonderment. Being a witness and a participant of this great unfolding is our highest bliss.

            The 13^th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart put it this way: “What good is it to me that Mary gave birth to the Son of God 1,400 years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God. God is always needing to be born.”

            And 13^th century Sufi poet Rumi put it this way in his poem Each Note:

God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.

Each note is a need coming through one of us

a passion, a longing-pain.

Remember the lips

where the wind-breath originated,

and let your note be clear.

Don’t try to end it.

Be your note.

I’ll show you how it’s enough.

Go up on the roof at night

in this city of the soul.

Let everyone climb on their roofs

and sing their notes!

Sing loud!

When we live authentically, answering the call and courageously trading security for the danger of self-realization, we honor ourselves and the universal source in one fell swoop. How can this not lead to rewards unimagined in more timid hours?

We do not breathe – we are breathed. We do not sing– we are sung. We do not make art – art makes us. As Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” And when you begin to experience life this way – not as a private event but as a wave in a boundless sea of waves – you slip into illumined stillness and from there everything is possible.

It is the role of the artist to bring forth these realizations in ever new forms relevant for their time and place, and to show us our oneness. Art connects us all in a binding ritual and reminds us of our common humanity. Art crosses all borders, no, annihilates all borders. The storytellers and film makers who reveal our secrets through the lives of their characters, the musicians who color our silence with sound, the poets who say the unsayable, the painters who show what cannot be seen, the sculptors who wrest shape from shapelessness – artists re-present the ineffable power of our own lives to us over and over again, and in this way affirm us in our limitlessness and infinite beauty.

As Meister Eckhart said, we are here to give birth to God – the formless source that takes form as our thoughts, our bodies, our words, our actions, and the majesty of the entire cosmos. “God is always needing to be born,” he wrote, and he was right. As we midwife one another’s birthing, and as we endure the sometimes agonizing process of our own birthing, we honor ourselves, each other, and the sacred source. Our lives are the instruments through which the universe sings. And as Rumi wrote, “Let your note be clear…be your note. I’ll show you how it’s enough.”