Spiritual Transformation: Turned Inside Out

Jesus said some very radical things, and I sometimes think we have grown deaf to them, or perhaps never fully engaged them. Maybe there is reason why we tend to dismiss Jesus’ words, why we have rarely considered them to any great depth. Recently on the discussion forum we talked about what role Jesus and his Jewishness might play in our understanding of both Christianity and Judaism. In that discussion, which threatened to derail more than once, the inflammatory idea of the Jewish people being labeled the “Christ killers” came up. Historically, the passage used to support this idea comes from Matthew 26:3–4: “The chief priests and the elders of the people were gathered together in the court of the high priest, named Caiaphas; and they plotted together to seize Jesus by stealth and kill him.” That single sentence has caused a great deal of mischief, historically serving to divide Christians and Jews from one another, often resulting in war and bloodshed.

I bring up that rather outrageous idea at the beginning of this newsletter to draw a very clear parallel. No one on this mailing list condones the kind of hatred and intolerance and the mutual distrust that has resulted from this passage. I do not condone the idea either. Further, to the ears of many contemporary believers the passage is entirely innocuous, and they are shocked that anyone would even suggest such an interpretation: I tend to be among them. My point in this newsletter is that however apparently founded in terms of textual criticism, such a reading misses the point. More on that idea in a moment.

A second thing that also emerged on the forum was the definition of faith traditions. If I identify myself as a Christian or a Jew (for example), those very definitions have an inside and an outside. Very often these definitions—and others like them—serve as insuperable barriers between “us” and “them.” It is certainly true that when we identify ourselves as “this” we are also implicitly identifying ourselves as “not that.” What we do with that realization, however, is another story altogether.

In the recent newsletter Destiny and the Complementary We, I talked about this very thing; ironically, I have in mind today to again talk about “destiny” and the “complementary we,” though with a deeper probe beneath the surface. The idea behind the “complementary we” is that we are not wrong in recognizing an “us” and a “them.” However, that recognition does not have to be seen as an analytic “either/or” definition, where it is either “us” or “them” (but not both). It can serve instead as a synthetic “both/and” where both “us” and “them” are enriched and made better by our differences. The example I often use is that of men and women. On the one hand, the so-called “battle of the sexes” furnishes movies, songs, literature, and other art forms with much of their drama. There is no doubt that, at times at least, the difference between having an X or a Y chromosome has caused very much of an “us against them” sort of divide and still continues to do so up to the very second. On the other hand, we have all seen beautiful relationships where a man and a woman were “made for each other.” He was fully he, she was fully she, and both he and she together formed the complementary we, partners working together, striding hand and hand into their world. Just as this man and this woman, are, individually, “this” and “other” and are not in the least wrong for taking pride in that distinction, we too can be “this” while everyone outside of us is “other,” and we can take a healthy pride in that distinction. However, this man and this woman also love and respect one another, and as his “this” and her “other,” as her “this” and his “other,” they form a team that mutually enriches them both. Likewise, even as we take a healthy pride in our faith affiliations, that does not at all mean that we have to define one another out of existence or see the categories as mutually exclusive such that they cannot benefit from one another’s existence and partnership.

Suffice it to say (to fall back on our example) that Christianity and Judaism are defined in a way that has both an inside and an outside. If we were to use Venn diagrams to chart the insides and outsides, we would see both overlap and true difference. Those areas of difference can serve to divide or they can provide opportunities to work together, particularly when Christians and Jews focus on the areas that overlap.

I have said that there is nothing wrong with definitions, nothing wrong with taking legitimate pride in our differences. I would like now to draw another distinction. What does our affiliation with a particular group or religious tradition mean? I argue that if the definition is purely external, then we have a distinction that, no matter how interesting and capable of filling us with a sense of belonging, is of no deeper value than what sports team we happen to prefer. In Europe for example, football (soccer as we say here in the States) is taken very, very seriously by a great many fans. While the news reports of people getting crushed to death from stampeding fans are probably the exception and not the rule, and while physical violence erupting between fans is probably not as common as it might sound when hearing coverage of such events, nevertheless, combined team loyalty and passions run high. There is a sort of vicarious experience taking place in which we identify in some way with the men or women on the field. There is a sense of pride and identification with our team of choice. Yet aside from that feeling of pride and identification—however powerful and real it may in fact be—what can be said for the actual transformation it effects in our lives or the lives of those around us in the community? I am not arguing that sporting events are wrong or that they should not exist or that we are wrong in enjoying them or that we should not have favorite teams. I am arguing that while such things have their place, that place is not a deep place of inward transformation and community involvement, at least not as a rule. (Community involvement might be an incidental result of sports teams and their fans, say, during a time of disaster where the nation is asked to pull together, but it could hardly be said to be normative of sports and fans in general.) Rallying behind our favorite sports team has much to do with identifying ourselves with a brand name.

I began this newsletter by talking about how radical the ideas of Jesus were; I then immediately jumped into the inflammatory idea of Jewish people as a whole being painted as Christ killers. I further suggested that both sides miss the point (the tragic historical fallout further evidence of my claim). Why? Because both sides are focused on the pride and identification of their team. It does us no good to ask who started it—probably Christians. Maybe we could argue that Jesus himself started it, since (according to the gospels at least) he came down pretty hard on the Jewish religious leaders. But that is not the point. The point is that this distinction focuses on the external forms of identification that miss the point because they fail to get to the level of inward transformation and resultant community involvement that works toward peace and healing. They cannot seem to get past a team mentality instead of focusing on both inward transformation and the complementary we. As a result, both miss the opportunity to hear what Jesus was saying. I repeat, Jesus said some pretty radical things.

Now let me say a pretty radical thing myself. It does not matter whether we see Jesus as the Son of God, the Messiah, or the Promised One, at least in terms of our being able to benefit from his teachings right here, right now, in this life. It has been argued—an oversimplification, but with a degree of truth—that Christianity is the religion of Saint Paul, not of Jesus. As the discussion forum thread was intended to put on the table for discussion, however else Jesus saw himself, he was clearly a Jew who identified himself with the teachings of the Tenach (Hebrew Bible/Christian Old Testament), even if his understanding of these teachings differed. For many Christians, the possibility that Jesus saw himself as anything other than the Second Person of the Godhead Incarnate is itself inflammatory and appears to undermine the very foundation of the Christian faith of salvation from sin by the atoning blood of Christ. That is perfectly fine. Neither the traditional Christian nor the Orthodox Jew has to agree on that point in order to profit from what Jesus taught.

Let us return to that passage in Matthew that has caused such a stir. That passage suggests that it was “the chief priests and the elders of the people” who sought to put Jesus to death. That is hardly the entire populace of Jews. Now we have no way to establish whether that is historical fact (aside from taking the bible on faith) or what all went into their considerations if it is. However, I would argue that it is hardly surprising if it is true, simply because of the things Jesus said. In short, he turned the Jewish understanding of the world upside down and inside out. Whereas many of the Jewish leaders took tremendous pride in their heritage and the teachings handed down to them, Jesus said that all of that was secondary to (1) intimacy with God, and (2) inward transformation. Organized forms of religion often tend to be threatened when someone comes along and calls into question their customs and norms on the grounds that they may be getting secondary matters confused with primary ones. Organized forms of faith, if they are not careful, can fossilize, rooting for their favorite football team while enacting violence on fans of the other team. That is misguided, however, because it superficially focuses on externals and holds the internal sense of pride and affiliation up to an entirely overblown standard. Its values should be exactly reversed. Ideally it would uphold an internal sense of truth and rightness before God to be primary and it would be concerned with externals mainly to the degree that they harmonized with this now renewed center. The result would be inward transformation and outward harmony, rather than outward affiliation of an exclusive “us” versus “them” that leaves us inwardly little better than we were before—while often resulting in outward disharmony as our party loyalties clash. If inward change takes place, outer transformation follows. If outer affiliation is primary, neither the inner nor the outer undergo much change.

Let me pause one more time and make it clear to anyone tempted to argue with me on this point. Am I saying that organized religion is wrong? Am I saying that Christians should not take pride in being Christians, Jews in being Jews? Not at all. If you are arguing with me on this point, you have missed everything I wrote in the first part of the newsletter about the complementary we, about defining ourselves in such a way that we recognize true difference, but in which we do not define another out of existence in the process. Like the man and the woman who are fully man and woman, our mutual love and respect for one another forms a new basis for our identity. We are who we are: the man is a man is a man is a man, and likewise the woman. But the heart has changed. Love and respect now characterize those identifications. The primary focus is not on the external differences now but on the internal values. Thus, the differences are ultimately secondary, the shared inner values of love and respect are primary.

The “battle of the sexes” occurs when the external differences are made to seem more important than the internal possibility of love and respect. The “battle of the sexes” is a competitive rather than a cooperative impulse, and a competitive impulse is necessarily “me first.” But “me first,” however valuable in the corporate world to force people into higher levels of performance and efficiency, is inherently self-centered: it is selfish and plays on personal pride. Without a transformation of heart, self-serving interest characterizes the exchange between the sexes resulting in combat and not peace, resulting not in love but in war. And if we are to believe the gospel narratives, many of the devout Jewish leaders had grown complacent and did not seem to be particularly overjoyed to be reminded that their hearts had seen little of any true spiritual transcendence. That is not so uncommon; it certainly is not limited to any one group of people. True spiritual transcendence is anything but easy, and most of us are pretty lazy and not particularly motivated to put forth the will power/effort and hard work it takes to seek out the truth and follow where it leads. By “true spiritual transcendence” I mean transformative spiritual truth—inward change—not merely intellectual sophistication in theological nuances that does little to effect any internal betterment of character. That confusing of secondary matters with true internal transformation is certainly not unique to the picture the gospels paint of many of the Jewish leaders in Jesus’ day: that seems to be true of religious systems the world over that seek personal advancement too often to the indifference of their relations to others. I would argue, then, that true spiritual transformation is personal insofar as it happens within the heart, but its effects are universal as it takes us up and out of ourselves into a level where we genuinely become more compassionate, caring, and considerate of other people.

So what am I saying if I am not speaking out against organized faith? I am saying that a tragic tendency of organized faith is to become fossilized, to harden over and become encrusted, to forget that what matters more than anything else is not party affiliation but inward transformation that in turn drives a new and different form of outer involvement to the benefit of all. A tragic tendency of organized faith is to become fans of a football team, gaining a sense of identity and loyalty, even stirring deep inner feelings at times, but failing to effect any kind of transformative change. That kind of identification is the identification of a brand name and little more: there is nothing beyond the brand name that leaves anything of value behind. We need inner transformation. Left to our devices, we all tend to be petty and material and in general lacking in love and compassion and mutual respect. And even if we tend to be pretty decent people overall, there is still plenty of ground for improvement. The deepest kinds of values do not happen by accident: they have to be cultivated to large degree, and until they become a part of our inner nature—until the transformation is genuine and complete—we will forever struggle against our pettier selves. And if we affiliate ourselves with any group that shares this same affiliation with a brand name while likewise sharing a sense of laziness on the part of true change, we will feel doubly justified, empowered by this group identification to resist authentic change when and where it presents itself, even, if we must, to stamp it out, discredit it, label it heresy or in general slander it so that we can tame it and be free from having to face what it suggests to us. By contrast, if we affiliate ourselves with a group of concerned people who realize the deepest internal values do not happen by accident and who seek to remind one another to be mindful, to seek genuine transformation, to become still better than they are, then we have found a group that has primary things solidly in place. With such a group, secondary matters tend to work themselves out naturally of their own accord because the value priorities of this group are properly aligned.

Now then, I have said Jesus was radical. Let us take as an example the Lord’s Prayer. How does it begin? It begins with the words “Our Father.” That’s radical! and most of us don’t even realize it, as those two words are so simple we simply gloss over them. Emmet Fox was the one who showed me just how radical those two small words really are. First, Jesus refers to God as our “Father.” And in his other teachings and parables, he makes it very clear what kind of Father God is: God is our loving Father:

The picture here is of a generous father who loves his children and is eager to give them good gifts. Yet for whatever reason, throughout the centuries and leading up to this very moment, people have had a tendency to see God in negative terms, perhaps because of the Freudian concept of parental influence; insights from Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, suggest that many people who have difficulty seeing God in a positive light have had absent, negligent, or abusive fathers. However, in the opening phrase of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus calls God “Father”—time and again he establishes that God is our Heavenly Father who not only loves us deeply but provides for our needs. But that is not all.

Jesus said OUR Father. He did not merely say “my Father,” and he did not say “your Father”—he said our Father. Now if that is the case, that means that we are all brothers and sisters. And that in turn also has several implications. First, a loving father loves all of his children, not just some of them. God, in other words, who created everyone also loves everyone. It also means that when we interact with other people, we are interacting with a brother or a sister, a child who shares with us our same Father. We are interacting with someone else who is a child of our Father, whether they know his name or not. That’s radical, and a good many people resist that implication because it might lead them to conclusions contrary to what their religious affiliation suggests. However, I think I have already said enough about the dangers of religious affiliations being little more than a brand name, rooting for our favorite football team while enacting violence on the opposing fans, metaphorically, at least, defining the other fans out of existence. Jesus, however, taught us to pray by addressing our Father, and if we have reason to boast, it is only because we know who our Father is, not because he is Father of us, or even to us, only.

One reason I so much admire and appreciate Martin Buber, the late, first-rate Jewish philosopher, is because he understood the truth that Jesus was saying here, not necessarily because Jesus said it, but because it was/is true. Buber’s most famous philosophy is summarized in the simple relational pairing of the words “I/Thou” in which there is a self-conscious decision on the part of the self (“I”) to reach out in faith and partner with God our Father (“Thou” meant as a term of both endearment and respect). Again, “I/Thou” is a type of relationship or union between ourselves and God. The result is that we interact with the world in a new way that changes us while also benefiting everyone else. In other words, Buber is advocating the very same thing that we see Jesus advocating: (1) intimacy with God, and (2) resultant inward transformation. To my knowledge Buber never gave up Judaism, even if detractors have sometimes dismissed him. The reason he is both dismissed and praised is because he was more interested in authentic spiritual transformation and truth than he was in brand names. He was Jewish, proud to be Jewish, and fully explored what that identity meant, agonizing over the question late into the night hours at times. He also had his priorities and values straight. That explains why his influence has “reached across the aisle” to inspire and encourage not only Jews, but also many Christians, Muslims, and even other people outside these faith traditions altogether. Buber was a beautiful human being, made beautiful because he was what he was without apology, yet his inner values of respect and compassion for others informed his outer affiliations forming a “complementary we” rather than a mutually exclusive “us” versus “them.”

Now I said that Jesus turned at least parts of the traditional understanding inside out and upside down—at the very least, he brought clarity where there had been only fuzzy notions and partial understanding before (at least for the vast majority of people). Take, for example, the idea in Exodus 21:23–27 that goes by the formal Latin name of lex talionis (literally “law of retaliation”):

Jesus turns the traditional understanding inside out and upside down, as we shall see in just a moment. However, we should be very cautious here. Many of the teachings that we have talked about thus far come from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which is perhaps a sort of “distilled microcosm” of his core message. Another teaching that comes from this same sermon (or codification of sermons, as perhaps better reflects the compilation choices of the biblical author) is found in Matthew 5:17–19:

Jesus did not abolish anything. I will come back to that point, but we need to get one more passage in place here so that we can show exactly why this claim is true. Specifically, Jesus says “You have heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ but I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also” (Matthew 5:38–39). Additionally—and perhaps most famously—Jesus says, “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12).

The law in Exodus is a law of reciprocity. There is a definite sense of justice here, a sense that it is wrong to inflict harm or injury on another person. Not only is there a sense of justice in that way, but the law of reciprocity is perfectly fair: your eye for my eye, not your life for my eye. Your tooth for my tooth, not your house burned down and your children put to death. This law in Exodus, however, is retroactive: it deals with justice after the fact. Jesus proposes a proactive law of reciprocity: “Do unto other as you would have them do unto you.” Jesus takes an outer law and places it squarely inward, internalizing the outward regulation such that it becomes a law “written on our hearts.” Metaphorically he “turns the Exodus law inside out and upside down.” The Exodus law deals with punishment, the Golden rule deals with prevention. Those are not two different laws: Jesus did not abolish anything. Rather Jesus showed the perfect fulfillment of the law, by moving it from the outer realm into the inner. If our inward attitudes change, our outer actions will take care of themselves, following naturally from this proper inner alignment.

To perfectly fulfill the law, we need preventative measures. We need to stop the problem before it even starts. That does not abolish anything—the need and desire for justice and fairness remains. Rather, it realizes justice and fairness (fulfills it), and it realizes (fulfills) it perfectly. If we do unto others as we would have them do unto us, at no point do we ever break the Exodus law. We may not have any further need of that particular law, but it is not because the law itself points to a false principle, it is because the law is now fulfilled, now realized, now seen to fruition. To abolish the law would be to suggest that justice is no longer binding, but justice is as binding a spiritual principle as it ever was: injustice has no place in the righteous life. It is simply that justice is now perfectly fulfilled. There is no contradiction in terms. (As a complete aside, we should also note that is entirely beside the point that Jesus is not the only moral teacher who has formulated this law of reciprocity; if something is true, we would expect that more than one person would have formulated/discovered it. Further, if God truly is “our Father,” we would expect more than one brother or sister to have an understanding of the way our collective Father has so constituted the world.)

Jesus of course taught many other things, including this passage in Matthew that ties in with the overall theme of the Sermon on the Mount (though not technically a part of the Sermon on the Mount). It is what some describe as a “prosperity teaching,” and they are quite correct in calling it that: it is a prosperity teaching, but we need to qualify what we mean by that designation. First, the passage:

Again, this passage is pretty straight forward; many of us have read it many times without thinking it over carefully. Many of us do not tend to think of this teaching as being a metaphysical law that is as certain to work as the purely physical law of gravity. Yet it is a cosmic law, and it is hindered only by our failure to understand and believe it. Let’s consider what is being taught here.

God is our Heavenly Father, a father who loves his children. His children are mortal creatures, and they need food, clothing, and shelter, which has increasingly come to be associated with money as societies have evolved to rely on a more “portable currency” than bartering goods and services. Money is more liquid than goods or services either one. If I do not need your chicken even though you need my blacksmithing skills, there’s no deal. With a common currency, however, you can sell your chicken to somebody else and return to me with something I can use in exchange for the service you need. Granted, you have to liquidate your assets—you still have to sell your chicken first—but money makes a great deal of sense as a means of bartering for basic goods and services. Thus, it is not a stretch to say that food, clothing, and shelter imply the legitimate need for money. Money existed in the day of Jesus every bit as much as it exists in our own day, even if gold and silver has given way to plastic and paper (and even electric circuits, very like the ones forming the letters you are in the process of reading just now).

So, our Heavenly Father loves his children, who are mortal, and who need food, clothing, and shelter and the money required to secure these provisions: the money required to “pay the bills.” And Jesus invites us to consider two different examples, the first dealing with birds and the second with flowers. Tell me, what exactly do birds do in order to deserve to be fed? Absolutely nothing. Birds stay busy just being birds. And what do flowers do in order to be clothed in such brilliant colors? Again, absolutely nothing. They are just busy being flowers. If they have any entitlement to the gifts they freely enjoy (aside from their—and our—Father supplying for them purely of his own loving accord), it is that they are busy simply being who and what they are: nothing more, nothing less. Hold that thought.

If God is our Heavenly Father, then we are his spiritual children. Our spiritual selves are the realest and truest selves, and our self-serving tendencies that fail to take into account the spiritual life are our petty and immaterial selves. And what again is the spiritual life? The spiritual life really is an inward life, a life that involves (1) intimacy with God and (2) resultant inner transformation. If we are transformed according to the laws and principles of our Father, who beget us, we will become more and more real and more and more authentic, our truest and best selves emerging more and more from the often artificial and superficial selves that we mistake for who and what we are. As this transformation is both (1) inward and (2) intimate, its manifestations will be as many as there are people to manifest. The golden rule, for example—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—manifests itself in myriads of different ways, depending on the people involved and the situation itself. It is not an outer regulation that has to conform to a certain mold and always look a certain way, but rather an inner mandate that has to be incarnated in very particular manifestations that are as new and varied as there are encounters and situations in which they may transpire. The Golden Rule, as with all of the spiritual life, is “ever new.” That’s radical. That’s unpredictable. That’s not safe. But it is real. And furthermore, our deepest and realest selves, just like the Golden Rule itself, will be at once (1) highly personal as well as (2) completely universal. That is, who and what we were created to be will be highly individual and yet it will always benefit and work in concert with everyone else. Our deepest and realest selves, once we are in tune with God, will be at once fully independent as well as interdependent: they will form the “complementary we” that celebrates differences rather than mutually excluding them.

So who and what we are is both (1) personal and (2) universal all in one. And we all have a particular way in which we can be of greatest service to the world. We all have different talents with which we were born (themselves unasked for and unsought gifts) that we can perfect and use to benefit everyone, ourselves just as much as everyone else. We all have different strengths, different areas in which we excel. If we channel that uniqueness, that personal distinctiveness, toward the collective good, we form one part of a universal picture of harmony and peace. Our dreams, both awake and (perhaps most especially) asleep, will reveal to us the path we are to take. No two of us are on the same path. If we serve God truly and from the heart, we are all headed in the same direction, but the path we take is as individual as we are ourselves individual. My path is not your path, your path is not my path. Yet my path will benefit your path, your path will benefit mine, and both our paths—if we travel our true path—share a common point of convergence. We may even walk our respective paths hand in hand, parallel, even overlapping at times, but never precisely identical. You are you, and I am me, and together we can form the complementary we.

My path is my destiny. Or, put in reverse, my destiny is my path. Based on the particular talents I bring, the particular circumstances in which I find myself, the particular people with whom I am surrounded: each of these point to a destiny for me that is absolutely personal and unique. Yet that destiny is also absolutely universal and harmonious as well, if I am truly following the destiny laid before me as a son (or daughter) of God. That path, that destiny, will be revealed to me in many ways both waking and sleeping: moment by moment, as I seek God’s will, my path will open up before me. My path, my destiny, is personal because I alone can travel it, yet it is universal as it shares a common destination and works in conjunction, in harmony, with all other paths.

Now back to the flowers and the birds. These creatures are being exactly who and what they are: the flower wears a fine coat precisely because what is inside the flower is manifesting itself outward. The bird likewise is nothing but a bird, its inner nature uniquely adapting it to gather where it has not sown and to reap where it has not gathered. The love of our Father would likely provide for these creatures regardless. Yet it is specifically what is inside these creatures that ensures that they will always have provision. Likewise, when we seek first the kingdom of heaven, we are seeking our true selves. When we seek the kingdom of heaven first, we are seeking our destiny, our path, our purpose and lot in life. As I have shown, that is personal but it also is part of the universal as well. And as we find our way, we can be assured that we will never want. God would likely provide for us anyway, but we can be sure that when we find exactly what we were created for, putting our particular talents and gifts to the service of the spiritual life, we will never want. We will be doing what we love and enjoy above all else, being the truest blessing we could possibly be because our lives are totally authentic and maximized in their potential, and on top of it all, we will prosper not only spiritually but also materially. We will be manifesting outwardly what we are inwardly; transformed inwardly, we will be our realest, truest selves with increasing consistency. The petty, immaterial self will gradually begin to dissolve, as it was never a real self to begin with. (Like evil, our false self is—for lack of a better way of speaking—“illusionary,” defined by absence or lack.) Who and what we were created to be will be natural and organic on every level, and authentic spirituality is always organic, even if it takes effort and will to cultivate. It takes effort and will to cultivate because we have to remember to be mindful, and not to become distracted by the cares, concerns, and trivialities of the world around. Like a doubting Peter, when the wind and the waves become more real than the Master, we sink into illusion and unfounded worry. If we had learned the lesson of the ravens and the lilies, truly learned, tattooing the lesson on our inward selves, we would know that all worry is illusion. It is not real, and it is not a manifestation of our real selves, which is a son or daughter of God, our Heavenly Father.

Now about prospering materially. Why do we have reservations about money and wealth? For the simple reason that money is often associated with greed, avarice, covetousness. These inner states are not spiritual, and they leave us impoverished no matter how fat our bank accounts. Any approach to wealth and prosperity that holds these “values” at its base ultimately impoverishes us. But we are not talking about wealth that impoverishes, but wealth that enriches, because it is wealth that is rightly held. Why is it wealth rightly held? It is wealth rightly held because we are right: our inner attitudes, desires, and perspectives have been changed, been made right, are now rightly aligned. We see money and wealth for what they are, as tools, and we recognize that our supply comes from God and that there is plenty of supply to go around. Greed, avarice, and covetousness have been purged from our system and replaced by the same values as our generous Heavenly Father himself who seeks to bless his children, not strive with them in some kind of jealous or self-interested competition. We realize that money and wealth come from our Father, and that our brother and sister also share the same Father, a Father without lack with all the wealth and money in the entire universe. That approach to money and material provision can only serve to do good. Our Heavenly Father is our source, all other humans our brothers and sisters, all other creatures our cousins and kinfolk. That kind of wealth can only enrich both ourselves and others because we seek (1) inward transformation and (2) intimacy with God. If the inner parts of a person are transformed, there is no need for outer laws any more, because while the one merely applies a band-aid, the other heals the wound.

A note of caution: Very, very often when we seek an inward spiritual transformation, we get worse before we get better. Do not be discouraged if you try and appear to fail, or succeed in one area only to see another area of your life completely fall apart. There are at least two things to be said for this. First, it is not literally true that we are getting worse before we get better. What is really happening is that when healing takes place in one part of our lives, it exposes other parts of our lives that have previously been buried. What is really happening is now that we are being exposed to greater light, those things that have been hiding in the shadows of our subconscious are now coming up into conscious awareness. The result is often both frightening and discouraging. But it need not be if we simply recognize ahead of time that it is a rule well charted out by our spiritual forebears that we often appear to get a lot worse before we get better: there is nothing wrong with us, and we are not failures! We appear to be getting worse because the wound is being scrubbed with soap and salt, and both sting and burn. However, the sting and the burn are the fruits of healing, and soon enough we can soap and salt all day long without the least pain, because we will have been completely healed. What is more, it may not appear that we are getting any worse, but it may discourage us because we nevertheless do not appear to be getting any better either. Very often other people will notice subtle changes in us long, long before we see them in ourselves. The reason is simple: we cannot see ourselves any more than we can see the eyeball we are using to see.

The second thing to note is that often the hardest part of being mindful is remembering to be mindful (and remembering to be mindful is what much of the spiritual life involves). The reason here is also simple. With our rationale minds, we can really only think of one thing at a time. The late Alan Watts talks about these ideas more fully if you want to download/listen to the MP3s here, here, and here. Basically, even though parts of our minds take in all the sensory input streaming in to our brain, conscious thought focuses on only one thing at a time (or one group of things at a time at best). That means that concentration is like a narrowly focused beam that can only be directed to one point at one time. Given the many cares and distractions in our world, we often forget to be mindful precisely because this narrow beam has become focused on distractions and cares rather than concentrating its focus on the deeper, unseen, inner realm. That is why the spiritual life is at once the easiest and the most difficult thing we will ever do. It is easy because it is profoundly simple, requiring us only to look to our Father in all things, in all our ways acknowledging him. It is difficult because we have a thousand and one distractions that weigh on us, filling our mind almost entirely, crowding out the key that unlocks all other doors unless we consciously fill our mind with visions of truth and beauty.

Archive note: See also the discussion forum thread regarding this newsletter.

I said that a lot of the spiritual life involves remembering to be mindful. One way that we do that is filling our minds with the beautiful pictures formed from truly getting a glimpse of the spiritual life: how complementary it is, how fully intertwined all its parts, how it reconciles apparent opposites, bringing everything into one whole while in nowise sacrificing even the smallest ounce of any one thing’s complete and utter uniqueness. That picture is beautiful, and if we feast our minds and our imaginations upon it, the result will be truly revolutionary. We have chosen to focus not on the failures and misunderstandings of historical faith traditions, but rather on universal, inner transformations and climbing ever higher spiritually. We have come a long way from the affixing of blame and the attachment of labels that characterized our opening paragraphs: let us pray that we remain that way.

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