 As his friend, Henry David Thoreau, would likely say, "Yes. You're right, Waldo. But all you needed to say was, "Soups' ready."
Some thirty years working a Soup Kitchen will eventually shape-shift you in every conceivable way. Eventually, again, comes the understanding that everyone in the Line, is you. They are all you... Wild Bill with his quivering eyes and spittle-drenched beard is all you. The quiet Mexican woman pulling out her tit to feed her hungry kid: both are you. The police officer strolling in and getting a cup of coffee while eyeing everyone: he's also you. And the manic dealer pulling out his gun while asking "Can I come in with this?" he too is only you... That "Mystical Body of Christ" Line is hungry... with a real hunger, not a philosophical or religious hunger... but human, animal like... and it all revolves around the thing deeper than the hospitality of fire, food, and the immense quiet of the universe: for what only amounts to a minute, you are alive... seemingly living within your solitary skin (sure, that's real enough, but still not nearly enough). So: here it is (perhaps enough truth to raise you from your coma): there is no one from whom you are separate: they are all you. Period. End of story myth belief or system. Every "they" "them" or "that" is you. This is the mystic teaching known as The Soup Kitchen Rag.
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 Many years ago, I was a hippie. But, then again, maybe I still am... Back then, my hair was brown, long, wavy and luscious. Now it's white. Ah, but my braid dangles to the mid of my back! Seriously, I have always thought "seriously" why in the world would anyone want to be "normal"? I mean, why be normal when you can be different!?
For me though, this being "different" was not a strategy: it still isn't. Going again to "back then" I was a true believer in the critique of the youthful philosophy embedded in the "hippie rebellion". While many of us were chanting "Hare Krishna" and / or using drugs to expand our consciousness (or just for the pleasures of a temporary escape), our collective hippieness had more to do with Jesus Christ than anything else... Not that Jesus of Power, though. But the one that had gotten himself hijacked by the purveyors of a new religion: who become a castrated caricature of a god mired in theologies of human darkness and sin instead of a "Dragon-Shaman" from the desert who understood the virtues of both water and wine-making... who knew techniques of mind and heart expansion... who had seen the connections between sexism, racism, and injustice and oppression... and who, like us, suddenly found himself conscripted to a Creed and power-system that simply mirrored that of Empire... Hippies adored Jesus and wanted him leading our rEvolution! Quotations From Chairman Jesus (Compiled by David Kirk of the Emmaus Community: Foreword by Daniel Berrigan) fit in pocket or backpack and uncomfortably proposed that Christianity is a way of life not, fundamentally, a religion. That Jesus became the god of men who blessed war, profited off the marketing of guns, and exploited the poor provoked many of us (and still provokes some) to reject the idiocies of bishops and systems of power and to look East for spiritual sustenance... On one night in particular, when (as I remember) nineteen years old, after long hours of deep questioning and meditation, I pleaded with my guru, Paramahansa Yogananda for an insight and help on my path forward. Never-minding that he was many years dead, Yogananda walked through the door of my room. I was quite surprised and wary. He simply smiled and walked right into me! Not "bumping" me, but right into me! Yogananda's body merged with mine: cell to cell, atom to atom, in an electrical shock-and-awe moment (minute? hour?). Did I get an answer to my prayer? Nope. At least, not the answer that promised anything either clear or easy... and looking back, I now understand something that I didn't expect: maybe the worst thing ever was Jesus becoming a Creed of belief instead of a Call to action... and maybe the worst thing now is the refusal of Christians to follow Christ... Seriously, where are the hippies now? Who is reading the Gospels through the Eyes of the Saints? While everyone is consuming themselves silly and complaining about inflation, St. Basil wrote: "Property is theft." St. Leo the Great wrote: "The price of the kingdom is the food you give to those in need." St. John Chrysostom wrote: "I am criticized often for my continual attacks upon the rich. Yes: because the rich continually attack the poor." St. John Chrysostom also wrote: "Feeding the hungry is a greater work than raising the dead." Origen wrote: "We Christians do not bear arms against any country; we do not make war anymore. We have become children of peace, and Jesus is our leader." And in another preview of hippie enthusiasm, St. Basil also wrote: "The Holy Spirit is present completely in every human person. He is everywhere whole, and shared without being divided. According to what we can give as human beings, we participate in the Spirit." Finally, I have tried to maintain my hippie enthusiasms! I saw homeless men sprawled in gutters. I tried to help them... and found myself overwhelmed with work and blessings, both... and now I give, perhaps, too much time in remembering my years on the Chinatown streets... I teach what I can to my children and whomever comes wandering our way... I keep my eyes peeled for the hippies of tomorrow... And I just live with a heart that keeps breaking open, over and over and over again... Oh, and, thank you very much Mr. Yogananda! I do look forward to your next visit (maybe in another twenty years?) I'm having way too much fun with Michelle!  At first glance, it may seem strange to you that a blog entitled "Learning to Pray" should begin with a photo of two, obviously, impoverished girls. And yet, as I was pondering possible images, this one stood out for me precisely because real prayer is always real. And "real" does not start with "need", rather "real" always, always, begins and ends with two things: I love you and I thank you.
If all that we ever pray is I love you and I thank you that would be enough! On the other hand, to desire to pray is to step out upon the path of soul cultivation. Practices that especially relate to soul cultivation include meditation, walking in nature, creating art, gardening, and cooking... why? Because there is no separation between soul and one aspect of life or another. To live is to be alive as soul. To be soul is to be a co-creator with the Quantum Consciousness intimate with each and every particle or possibility in the Universe. Therefore, to pray is to be who you already are... To learn to pray also means to develop the will to change. If you have the idea in mind that you could put your hand into a raging furnace and not get burned -- well, you get the point, right? And this is absolutely not to say that the Divine would or could cause you intentional harm, but that as you pray, you will inevitably want to draw nearer and nearer to the Source of your desire to pray... Mystics of old have always taught that prayer opens one to "the way of the heart": key words are identification, adoration, and surrender... Perhaps you see the similarities between learning to pray and learning to become a pleasurable lover: everyone who has "fallen" in love identifies with her lover, finds intense pleasure in adoring her lover, and willingly climbs the peak of pleasure to rest in the glow of a mutual surrender: that which makes for great sex has its intimate parallel in prayer... There is a wonderful love-poem in the Bible called The Song of Songs... in some sense prayer is a mutual seduction: the Divine Beloved and the Human Being-Soul... now here, now there, now this, now that... One of the most wonderful books on prayer is Nan C. Merrill's Psalms for Praying. Here's a single line from the book: O Beloved, why do I believe that I can separate myself from You... As the author teases out the inner-heart of the psalms, one inevitably begins, perhaps for the first time to genuinely pray... Another magnificent introduction to prayer is Paramahansa Yogananda's Whispers From Eternity. The upshot of all of Yogananda's writings is simple: God is Alive as Being-Consciousness-Bliss. This thus-ness is the ontological Reality of the Universe: of Every Being and Every Thing... From molecules to galaxies, everything is in motion: everything spins and spirals in pure poetry and song: learning to pray is simply to add your voice and your heart and your life to this delightful Being-Consciousness-Bliss... Rumi wrote: I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being. Every moment of every life is experienced in the intersection of the human with the Divine (Quantum) Consciousness. Likely as not, there are some three hundred billion galaxies. So, when it comes to learning to pray, we need to follow the example of our arms: they open outward... There is another "likely as not" important to consider: like the two girls in the above photo, life does not come with particular guarantees. Many of us (most) will break in numerous ways. And our breaking is but the promise of our eventual dissolution. One might very well call this a dark comedy: and it might be comedic if it didn't hurt so much... Now to the essential point: the arms that open inward are never ours... which is the deep awakening of prayer... everyone has the option to believe this or that; to divide this way or to join in the conquering of that way; but no matter which way that we turn, there stands, always, the One Question: "Who am I?" You might think that I'm crazy, but I think that we are all on our journey through time and space to affirm, in concert with the Beloved, "I am Compassion." To, finally, pray is to cross the threshold of no question, no answer and to simply rest in Being-Consciousness-Bliss...  The Perfect Bliss of Miracles
If you have read, perhaps somewhat carefully, the page entitled "Introduction", you would have come across a word, an idea, and a spirituality, virtually unknown to most: pan-sacramentalism. In essence, it means the Kingdom of Heaven is within you! The Kingdom is right here, right now! In other words, you are living in a world that is pregnant with the Divine... You are living, moment-by-moment, truly, within the Breath and the Touch of the Sacred Presence... It should not then surprise that the Mystic Poets, like Rumi and Hafiz, often referenced the varieties of Sacred Pleasure... What then is a "miracle"? I will offer an emphatic "No!" to the idea that a miracle is evidence of the Divine "breaking through" to effect something special... Rather, as if from a profoundly deep sleep, we momentarily awaken to the Really Real... only to, inevitably, fall back into our habitual slumber... This is our version of "normal", of our "reality" in life... But here's the thing: we have been "constructed" instead, to live in a steady state of the miraculous: this "condition" is supposed to be our "normal", our "Real Reality"... The Kingdom of Heaven is within you! Life is for living, even through the bad parts. There is simply no way to escape from pain and suffering. However, too often we are "taught" that we are supposed to constrain our expectations and our attachments, as if such a trick would somehow work a bit of magic... Or, on another hand, others insist that life is a school of lessons to learn so as to eventually be worthy or saved from all of the stuff we hate... The truth for most of us is that we live way too small! We hunker-down into something or other to "manage" or to cope... but, are we really alive? Are we ever really happy or content or satisfied? Life is for living! All along we should have had teachers telling us the truth, not just some one Nut-Prophet-Christ in Ancient Palestine, that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us: all around, everywhere! Indeed, the very world is Pregnant with the Divine... Our every breath is a miracle... Ah, but what you want is some sort of testimony, some sort of proof that these words are true... What would you consider a "miracle", as evidence that the Kingdom is Possible... that perhaps, it just might be true? It likely would mean nothing to you if I were to write in affirmation that I have had multiple experiences of miracles... that I affirm Michelle, Donovan, Devin, and Rose of Sharon as the greatest miracles of my life... and you would likely just say, perhaps even in mild contempt, "Oh, that's so sweet..." Okay. Then, how about this one... Drifting back in time (I've forgotten the exact year, though not the exact details) to around the year of 1984... I had started a little Catholic Worker House in 1982. Our very small original community of five persons prepared sandwiches and soup in the house we were renting and daily took the food down to our "local" skid-row where we set up shop: a card-table soup line... As you might expect, money was hard to come by. One day, or rather, one night I knew that our experiment in faith and action was going to end: we had no money left. We had no food in the refrigerator for the next days' meal... I woke the depressed. I told the first volunteers who showed up that there was nothing left... a volunteer, Anna Marie, suggested that we say a prayer (why hadn't I thought of that?). Kevin suggested that he read something from the Bible (why hadn't I thought of that?) Of course, he picked that infamous lie that Jesus took a couple of fish and a few loaves of bread and fed over five thousand men (not counting women and kids, of course)... so maybe over ten thousand people dined on two damned fish and a few loaves of bread... give us all a break, right? That's exactly it: Kevin read the story. The five of us circled up holding hands and recited the Lord's Prayer. That was exactly it: nothing more. I was completely empty. Right then, holy shit! There was a knock at our door. "Would you like some bread? You can have as much as you want. You just have to unload the truck yourself." As we were praying, a semi-truck had pulled up in the front of our house... We had bread stacked three-feet deep across the sofa: everywhere you could put some bread... Exactly then: as I walked back into the house with the last of the bread, the phone rang. I turned to Bob, the volunteer on my right, saying, "God, I hope that's not a donation of more bread!" It wasn't. Rather, it was a fisherman wanting to know if we'd like four hundred pound of fish... Miracles are not the hope that something wonderful will come to us (like winning a lottery). Rather: miracles are the very stuff of the Universe: breathing in, we receive the Breath of the Divine Oneness... breathing out, we return the favor... this mutual in-dwelling is the Really Real... The Kingdom of Heaven is within you! The inescapable conclusion is this: our one task in life is to awaken to What Is... and then to increase our capacity and skill in living awake: we practice the Presence of God; we practice Compassion; we Build Justice for Everyone, we strive for Nonviolence, Mercy, Forgiveness, and Kindness as our lifestyle; we practice and learn to recognize the Beatitudes everywhere; we do not lie, manipulate, oppress or exploit; we practice abundant simplicity and so eliminate greed; we practice happiness and pleasure; we give up fear... One could describe this, in somewhat mystical terms, as "the burn of Love's hand"... but it isn't a "burn" that hurts. It's all a miracle that liberates... The perfect bliss of miracles is that you have the opportunity to create a life of deep meaning and purpose: for others...  The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. -- Jesus Assuming this statement to be true is not a prophetic option for most folks who consider themselves to be Jesus' disciples: it is not a "Church" consideration... which is, precisely, why Christianity is a "religion" and not a vital force for anything very much... Preaching a "salvation" theology instead of a "kingdom" has eliminated the rEvolutionary dynamism of Jesus' teaching: effectively castrating him... (sorry if that seems harsh to you)... but consider...
The Kingdom of heaven is within you is an invitation to a break-through into an evolutionary leap forward into a New Human Being: one in whom the Christ-Consciousness has been birthed. This new consciousness is so incredibly expansive that our current limits of imagination can barely touch its outer edges. It is a revelation of the Sacred Heart of the Divine Beloved opening, forever opening, into the world and into the very heart of creation: presaging the regeneration of the Planet and the "radical" redistribution of equality, justice, and peace in favor of everyone! St. Hildegard of Bingen (a Doctor of the Church) described prayer as breathing in and breathing out the one breath of the universe. One could also say this in regards to the kingdom of heaven is within you. It is everywhere and it is nowhere. It is visible in the heartbeat of matter and at the same time invisible to any who would use it to their own advantage. It is all-powerful and completely powerless. It is Way and so it cannot be controlled, purchased, or exploited. It is free. It is the essential nature and the unlimited Reality of Life, Living, and Loving... Magnificat Mary intuited the burgeoning kingdom-consciousness that was to grow within her: and she proclaimed it with her gifted kingdom-life. (Luke 1: 46 - 55 excerpts) My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior... holy is his name... he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their heart... he has put down the mighty from their seats, and has lifted up the meek... he has filled the hungry with good things; and dismissed the rich empty... Jesus expanded upon his Mother's kingdom-consciousness with his own to-the-very-roots-of-the-matter Beatitudes (Matthew 5: 3 - 11 and Luke 6: 20 - 26) in which there are the kingdom-blessings toward the humble, the hurting, the meek, the justice-hungry, the merciful, the vision-filled, the peacemaker, and those persecuted for the sake of justice for theirs is the kingdom of heaven! The Kingdom of heaven is within you is the prophetic knowing, beyond words and objective reality, that there is a deeper Reality, in fact, that there is Only One Really Real... and that is the Universal Compassion that has Sourced Evolution in the Sacred Rise of Consciousness: but with consciousness comes universal responsibility. We are, each and all, responsible for the well-being, for the full-development and liberation of every other human being: indeed, as we are now learning, we are all responsible for the well-being and the regeneration of the entire Planet. Almost as an aside, and yet as something of immense importance, is the word kingdom. Perhaps most people nowadays misconstrue this word: as if Jesus was blessing the idea of a monarchy or identifying himself with a "kingship". Rather, when Jesus used the Aramaic equivalent of kingdom he was stating what should be obvious: we are being invited into a "new" reality and a new life of tuning into Jesus' own consciousness: the Christ Consciousness of New Life in Love, Lover, and Loving without Limits! The Kingdom of heaven is within you is the stunning realization that we are not called to "just" believe in Jesus but rather to instead put on the mind of Christ... Cynthia Bourgeault, Episcopal priest and contemplative mystic, in her book The Wisdom Jesus puts it this way, "He's proposing a total meltdown and recasting of human consciousness, bursting through the tiny acorn-selfhood that we arrived on the planet with into the oak tree of our fully realized personhood. The Kingdom of heaven is within you is the most radical statement ever uttered by a human being: it is the evidence of an awakening into something / someone brand new: from this point forward there is an opening into "no separation" between the Divine and the human: rather, there will be a "mutual indwelling": I am in You, You are in Me, and Together we are in Each Other... as cells in One Body...  The hope of the future would seem to lie with the small communities...
-- Fr. Bede Griffiths I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. -- Mary Oliver What a miracle it is that we have, as likely as not, breathed the same air as both Fr. Bede and Mary Oliver! This possibility truly tickles me! It is amazing thing -- an absolute miracle in point of fact -- to be alive! And! Everyday we have the option, better, we have the opportunity to lovingly take the world into the arms of our prayers and our actions. This availability can become the very center of our daily living: living on the side-lines of our lives should no longer be an option... we have been adorned with bodies to give form to our souls... and we have been born into an axial-age with the authority to make a huge difference by means of our lives. Yes. I wrote that last line as I had intended: authority. In other words, these times in which we live authorizes us to live into the vision of an earth of shared dreams, of shared resources, and of shared power-in-compassion... This is genuine authority... The authority of domination, exploitation, and oppression is absolutely contrary to any sort of life in faith: if your religion blesses and / or excuses greed, sexism, racism, planetary destruction, or violence to achieve its ends then it is not religion that you follow but an ideology in service to the acquisition or the maintenance of privilege, profit, and power. This can never be called a "spiritual life"... Consider: a few profoundly rich people and multi-national corporations live in reverent service to the Dominator Paradigm ("what's good for me must be good for all")... This Dominator Paradigm operates in endless pursuit of the aforementioned privilege, profit, and power: you do not matter, and neither does democracy, to this paradigm. And as is increasingly obvious, the Earth itself does not matter: not the air, not the water, not the soil, and not the creatures... The economics they employ is bald predatory capitalism. The culture they subscribe to is male-dominate, white, and heterosexual. The means they use are oppressive, media-manipulative (it used to be called brainwashing), and violent. Authority: instead, you are authorized to acquire a vision suitable for the times... you can choose to cultivate partnership, cooperation economics, social equality, a practical nonviolence, earth regeneration, and simple living (with "enough" and "mutual aid" as organizing and motivating means and ideals)... Global justice is not a pipe dream: it is an actuality waiting for your authorization. Eco-feminism, a green economics, nonviolence, and communities of consciously cultivated pleasure are within the reach of this century: they need only your effective authorization! No "just visiting" allowed: it is time to get a little of that rock'n'roll spirit and "get all shook up": goddamn it but if you are reading this you are alive! This matters as much as anything else in the Universe. Engage in the work of personal and social transformation. Every moment is a "theophany", a "showing" of the Divine... Mary Oliver wrote, "It is not hard to understand where God's body is. It is everywhere and everything." In other words, as you live the Beatitude Insights, slowly, yet steadily, everything will change. Here it is: Jesus said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." His teachings authorize radical living, radical prayer, and radical practice... so drop the "just visiting" attitude, tribe-up, change your mind, and build the earth worthy of our children. You are the Second-Coming that Jesus longs for!  Photo of Dorothy Day by my friend Bob Fitch
Contrary to the seeming evidence of the time in which we live, might there still be space for the search for truth? Who now wonders "what is real?" Why is it now so easy to confuse people with a plethora of stupidity, malicious misinformation (lies), and manufactured dullness? Billionaires ride their rocket-dildos to the edge of space and the Big Lie festers in millions of previously intelligent people: none giving the least bit of evidence that there just might be a Really Real worth finding and following... Recently, a Facebook friend shared a post outlining a "religious faith" in which a rapture featured in a cosmic rupture of time and space: confused with a "Second Coming" of Jesus... and the surety of a Heaven for the "saved"... Now, Jesus seemed to think that there was, in fact, a heaven... for he oftentimes referred to it... But you know what? As a first-class mystic, he was far more rEvolutionary than given credit by the fundamentalists of the now Christian faith. In fact, his revolutionary thought placed heaven in the least likely of places: in you and me! In our hearts and in our thinking minds! The Kingdom of Heaven is within you! Our Father who art in heaven... so begins the prayer that he taught his disciples... He is, through these words, proposing a complete re-orientation of spirituality from desired outcomes to a radical change of consciousness! With the wild quantum physicists of the past one hundred years and the mystics of the ages (and every religion), Jesus is directing our attention inward: the Real Reality is the Root-of-the-root-of-the-root all the way down and through "reality" into the very structures of atoms and the empty space that fills all the Universe: the kingdom of heaven is within you... You can't rupture, rapture, or "get there" because there is no "there" other than "here" (which, of course, is everywhere)... The Real Reality is the Oneness... Jesus stretched the imagination of his people with the mystic-proposition that "God" was Father (Abba-Daddy): that the "I Am" of ancient Jewish insight was an all-encompassing, yes feminine, Wisdom... in every way contrary to ordinary thought and everyday actions... Christian religion has surrendered its original insight and passion to a boring path of self-adoration (rapture) mixed with the manufactured fear of hell: parable became policy, the better to serve empire and control. Political obedience annihilated the rEvolution of Jesus: burying the Magnificat, ignoring the Beatitudes, and blessing predatory greed, militarism, and sexism (now masked as conservatism or neo-fascism and belief in Jesus!) Attention was diverted from the radicalism of the Magnificat by means of virgin-worship... And just how many fundamentalists are there petitioning local government officials to erect monuments to the Beatitudes instead of to the Ten Commandments? Right belief became (and still is) the phony essence of Christianity as it is generally "practiced", while Jesus always spoke about the importance of right action: whatsoever you do to the least person among you, you do to me! I was hungry and you fed me! Love your neighbor as your "other" self! Woe to you rich! How blessed are you poor! Love your enemies! Christians should be worshipping the heavenly-God (Divine Beloved) within every human being and within all of nature: we should be celebrating jubilee-lives by re-distributing all wealth so there are no poor: we should be celebrating the equality of all persons, female with male, like Jesus did: we should be racing to the bottom, not clawing for nearness to the top: we should be loving every neighbor on the Planet: all made possible because we have cleaned our eyes with an interior vision informed by a unitive consciousness: God flowing, as a river, in you, in me, in-between us and everyone as we surrender into the divine grace of an inter-abiding: as cells of the One Body of the Kingdom of Heaven! This! This is the Real Reality... |
AuthorRobert Daniel Smith was privileged to serve the homeless and marginalized for 30 years in California. He is living now almost within shouting distance of the Twin Cities. He is a poet, artist, writer, and long-time Companion of the Way still dreaming... Archives
May 2022
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