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A Call to Deep Inner Preparation and Listening.

Updated: 12 minutes ago


Good day, good people,

 

We have emerged from Holy Week and now find ourselves in the reverberations of the Paschal Season—also known as Eastertide—which stretches across fifty luminous days. In her book The Wisdom Jesus, Cynthia Bourgeault invites us to approach this season as a time of training. She encourages us to fast or "lean out" at the physical level to support the heart in listening more deeply, and to attune our subtle energetic bodies (second bodies) to what is already reaching toward us from just beyond the visible horizon, towards what is ahead.

 

This is a season of calibration—so that our whole embodied being might become available to truth at a subtler and more intense level (p. 126). And perhaps more importantly, so we can bear the coming intensity without our nervous systems becoming overwhelmed.

 

While we cannot predict exactly what lies ahead, as Wisdom students on the path of the awakened heart, we are not unfamiliar with allowing ourselves to become more receptive to what lies beyond the ordinary senses. We grow more at home navigating the unknown.

 

Yet, what seems to be emerging on the horizon is an intensification of global tensions—a deepening of polarization, chaos, destruction, loss, pain, and suffering. Within this struggle, there are undeniable forces opposing one another. One that appears to be a force of collective impulse toward growth in Being consciousness and conscience. Pushing against it, however, is an equally potent impulse toward entrenchment in the egoic operating system: driven by the relentless pursuit of power, control, security, esteem, and gratification.

 

Amidst this intensifying polarity, a call emerges. It is the call of those who can bear this reality—who can hold the tension comfortably and with curiosity without collapsing into despair or lashing out in reactivity. These are the ones who might midwife the new. As Wisdom teaches, we should not be surprised by such times of turmoil. Gurdjieff reminds us that Being only increases in the presence of opposing forces. Perhaps, then, this collective impulse toward greater Being consciousness and conscience can only take shape as a new structure of integral wholeness when met with the full weight of our unmet and unrefined desires—the raw, bodily cravings for safety, power and affection.

 

If we can hold the tension of these opposing impulses—one for collective growth of Being and one for the Collective pursuit of programs for happiness—neither bypassing nor collapsing, we become the vessels through which the "third force" may emerge—a reconciling force that allows something new to be born. This suffering is not meaningless. It is lawful, permissible, and perhaps necessary in the unfolding of a new order, a new structure, a new possibility.

 

What if it is precisely these opposing forces that are required for the emergence of collective objective conscience—an intensification of consciousness as we assist in birthing a new world? If we view this tension as necessary, we can begin to perceive that which threatens or scares us as that which is needed for our transformation.

 

For those who can and choose to say yes, we are being invited to continue taking up our collective post with needed inner characteristics. Patience, because we do not know how long the arc of this cycle of evolution will take or whether we will live to see its fruition. Robustness, because we must be grounded in stability, steadfastness, firmness, flexibility and not give way to despair or reactivity. Metis (as Cynthia has recently been teaching)—the ancient Greek term for skillful means and wise cunning—because navigating these times calls for creativity, discernment, and grounded action. And Integration, because it is only in bringing polarized parts together in relationship again that collective wholeness is Wholed.

 

Let us remain steadfast in this sacred work, each in our own way, each in our own place, with hearts open and ears attuned to what is being whispered in the silence.

 

Heather

 

Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses

*All previous readings & reflections can be found here*

 

Monday, April 14th with Catherine

 

Reading: “From a wisdom point of view, what can we say about the passion?... The key lies in the idea of reading Jesus’s life as a sacrament: a sacred mystery whose real purpose is not to arouse empathy but to create empowerment.

 

“The path Jesus walked is precisely the one that would most fully unleash the transformative power of his teaching. It both modeled and consecrated the eye of the needle that each one of us must personally pass through in order to accomplish the “one thing necessary” here, according to his teaching: to die to self. I am not talking about literal crucifixion, of course, but I am talking about the literal laying down of our “life,” at least as we usually recognize it. Our only truly essential human task here, Jesus teaches, is to grow beyond the survival instincts of the animal brain and egoic operating system into the kenotic joy and generosity of full human personhood. His mission was to show us how to do this. It was a mission he freely accepted. And the energy of his freedom is what ultimately raises the passion above all the emotional trappings and reveals it as a sacred path of liberation.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus

 

Chant: Bind my head and my heart to you, O Holy One, O Holy One, O Holy One (by The Oriental Orthodox Order in the West)

 

Tuesday, April 15th with Catherine

 

Reading: “As he drew near, he saw the city and wept over it, saying, “If this day you only knew what makes for peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes.” — Luke 19:41-42

 

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how many times I yearned to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings, but you were unwilling” — Matthew 23:37 

 

Chant: Kyrie with body prayer of sign of the cross (Taize)

 

Wednesday, April 16th with Catherine

 

Reading: “Six days before Passover Jesus came to Bethany, where he had raised Lazarus the dead man to life. Now Martha waited on them. Lazarus sat at the table with Jesus. Then Mary took a pound of costly perfume with genuine nard and anointed the feet of Jesus, wiping them with her hair. And the whole house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

 

“Then Judas, son of Simon Iscariot, the disciple who would betray Jesus remarked, “This perfume could have been sold for over three hundred silver coins and the money given to the poor.”

 

“But Jesus rebuked him saying, “Leave her alone. Was she not keeping it for the day of my burial? Truly I say to you, whenever the gospel is proclaimed all over the world, what she has done will be told in praise of her.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, From John and Matthew interwoven, Holy Week Liturgies 


Music: Stabat Mater Dolorosa (by Josquin des Prez)

 

Thursday, April 17th with Catherine

 

Reading: [JESUS AND HIS DISCIPLES ARE GATHERED FOR THEIR LAST MEAL – the Passover supper] “When the hour came, he took his place at table with the apostles. He said to them, “I have fervently desired to eat this Passover meal with you before I suffer” ” — Luke 22:15

 

 

Reading: [WASHING OF THE FEET – This action turned the social order upside down (Beatrice Bruteau)] “He rose from supper and took off his outer garments. He took a towel and tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and dry them with the towel around his waist. So when he had washed their feet [and] put his garments back on and reclined at table again, he said to them, “Do you realize what I have done for you? [I, your teacher and master, have washed your feet.] I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.” —  John 13:4   

                                                             

 

Reading: [EUCHARIST – Do this in memory of me – feed each with other with your lives as – as I have done (Beatrice Bruteau)] “Then he took the bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which will be given for you; do this in memory of me.”


“And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you.” — Luke 22:19-20

 

 

Reading: [LAST TEACHING] “My children, I will be with you only a little while longer…So now I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.” —John 13:33

 

 

Reading: [IN THE GARDEN] “Then he said to them, “My soul is sorrowful even to death. Remain here and keep watch.” — Mark 14:34

 

“Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will.” — Mark 14:36

 

 

Friday, April 18th with Catherine

 

Reading: “…he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; And found in human appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” — John 19:25

 

“Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala.” — Philipians 2:7-8

 

Music: We Venerate the Cross with body prayer of sign of the cross (by Vox De Nube, Norin Ni Rian and the monks of Glenstal Abby)  

 

Saturday, April 19th with Catherine

 

Reading: “One of the greatest medieval mystics, Jacob Boehme, made the challenging assertion, “God cannot enter hell, but love can enter hell and there redeem it.”

 

“… I suddenly understood what Boehme meant and what Jesus was up to during that pivotal moment in the passion drama. He was just sitting there—surrounded by the darkest, deepest, most alienated, most constricted states of pained consciousness; sitting, if we can imagine it, among all those mirroring faces of the collective false self that we encountered earlier in the crucifixion narrative, … sitting there in the midst of all this blackness, not judging, not fixing, just letting it be in love.  

 

“And in so doing, he was allowing love to go deeper, pressing all the way to the innermost ground out of which the opposites arise and holding that to the light. A quiet harmonizing love was infiltrating even the deepest places of darkness and blackness, in a way that didn’t override them or cancel them, but gently reconnected them to the whole.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, p. 123

 

Easter Sunday, April 20th with Heather 


Reading: “The jagged, binary nature of this realm of existence, a reality attested to by all the great spiritual traditions… arrived through no human fault or error but as the precise conditions required to make possible a particular kind of divine self-disclosure. Only at this particular density, within these sharp edges and term limits (the ultimate one, of course, being death), do the conditions become perfect for the expression of the most tender and vulnerable aspects of divine love. Built right into the deep structure of this realm, then, is a "Planck's Constant" of darkness and density. It belongs to the warp and weft of creation itself, and to dissolve it is to cancel the very conditions through which this realm makes its uniquely important contribution to the divine fullness.

 

“I remember first coming across this idea decades ago [reading] Annie Dillard's wonderful first book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek [where she wrote]... a paragraph that has stayed vividly with me all these years:

 

“That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each day form had baked into it, fired into it, a blue streak of non-being, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode. We could have planned things more mercifully, perhaps, but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agreed to the very compromising terms that are the only ones that being offers.

 

“The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die... The world came into being with the signing of that contract.

 

“Dillard was the one who first got me to thinking in this cosmological—or ontological, to use the technically correct term—perspective. It had not previously occurred to me that this irreducible brokenness might in fact be part of the givens of this realm itself. It was simply not one of the options that my classical theological training would have led me to consider. In our usual take on the Christian mystery, with the emphasis so much on personal sin, we lose sight of the fact that death and finitude really are collective, the backdrop against which everything else unfolds. Without denying our individual responsibility here, I would merely say that the boundary conditions are deeper than our individual existence. This is something the wisdom tradition has always known and insisted upon.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, p.120-121

 





 


 
 
 

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