Building Your Sacred Life, Part Two...

The Eastern Church has a special book of prayer entitled Philokalia, which translates as love of the beautiful, the exalted, the good... For a long while in my life, this book was quite important to me, but even more so, was the little book The Way of a Pilgrim... Both extol the Jesus Prayer or Prayer of the Heart... J. D. Salinger's book Franny and Zooey is a serious-comical introduction to this prayer...

When one is neck deep, or even knee deep, in the struggles involved in simple survival, redemption / penance theology seems to bring into focus the pains, hurts, disappointments, and failures that so many of us experience: and that oftentimes even become our self-definitions... living as a penitent corresponded quite well with running a Soup Kitchen: we were all the barely living dregs of society: a brother-sisterhood of the used, abused, and utterly screwed up... 

​However! Occasionally, one is jerked clean out one's story -- even out of one's skin! I think that the beginning of wisdom is the decision to expect such an eventuality: to plan for it: to prepare for it: to look for it, everyday, not in spite of one's life challenges, but precisely because of them... the Prayer of the Heart is the story of the New Creation, breath-by-breath, re-constructing a brand new you... (not that the either the old, or the current, you is not "good enough")...

​"Right thinking" isn't about "right beliefs, theologies, churches, creeds, systems, etc." 

​Rather, to think aright, is to recover one's original mind: before the hurts and fears took over... For some, in a sense, it even means to return to the Mother's womb, before her addictions, hurts and fears, harmed both of you... For the rest of us, we've got to at least return to the child-mind: when wonder named our day... A gentle centering of your incoming / outgoing breath, in your heart, is the conscious re-sanctification of the life you were supposed to have...

​The perfect prayer for this re-sanctification is simple: with your incoming breath, mentally, say I love you... with your outgoing breath, mentally, say I thank you... This you has to be a Big Collective, indeed, a very Big Collective: including you, the possibility of a Divine Universal Consciousness, your family (even those who have hurt or abandoned you), and Everyone Else as well... We are all in this together: it is either All of us making it, or None of us! (This All is integral to the New Creation)...

"My" new Philokalia has not a word to say about sin: it does, though, have very clear requirements: Cause no harm. Do not lie. Do not serve any system of oppression. Practice beauty. Imagine Paradise. Surely and steadily, the optimal life condition of wonderment will then come into your life, sort of life a series of road-side or curb-side flowers blooming, seemingly, from out of nowhere... 

​It is precisely here that God Dies. And when you finally give up on even the idea of "God": He / She / It will rise in your heart as the Divine Beloved... Swami Prabhupada, in his translation of the Bhagavad Gita, writes of the different ways in which the devotee can relate to the Divine: lover is the secret of secrets... Graham M. Schweig, in his translation of the same book, reveals this same core truth, a truth that annihilated the poet Rumi (read all about it in his Big Red Book, translated by Coleman Barks), a vision that confounded the likes of Lalla, Hafiz, Francis, Teresa, and John of the Cross: Hear still further the greatest secret of all, my supreme message: "You are so much loved by me!" 

​What can we say? What need we say, beyond "I love you" and "I thank you"? This simple little key turns time on its hinges, and opens the door, to our divine possibilities...

​Part Three, coming Wednesday, December 9, 2020