Reconnecting with the Journey

Meditation Room at Tearmann Spirituality Center. Father Michael and Breta prepare for a half hour of morning meditation: a few words of inspiration and 20 minutes of silence.

Over the past four years, I have been surprised with the gifts, graces, and tools that the Trinity- God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit- has laid before me to heal and grow.  In order to confront my ego self, see more clearly how I’ve blocked love, and examine ways my emotional and mental patterns get stuck, I have been learning from new- yet old- schools of thought and religious traditions.  Enneagram work has been life changing. Buddhist teachers, like Pema Chodron and guests on the Ten Percent Happier Podcast, have taught me critical skills in self-compassion through presence, silence, breath work, and meditation practices. I have been surprised and so grateful for these gifts.  They’ve even enriched for me Christian teachings that I never really embodied because I needed some additional understanding, perspective, and practice. 

In The Rebirthing of God: Christianity’s Struggle for New Beginnings, Author John Phillip Newell so eloquently puts words to my journey by writing that one of the signposts for Christianity’s future will be to Reconnect with the Journey.  “As much as the species of the earth need one another to be well, so we need one another as religious traditions.  Our true well-being will be found in relationship, not in isolation.”   Religious traditions have gifts to offer freely to the world for the good of the world.  I like how Newell differentiates Eastern and Western traditions, helping us to see how what was developed separately might contribute to a better whole if married. 

What do the West and East each bring to this relationship?  In Newell’s words:

“The West never forgets the transcendence of the Sacred, the otherness of the Divine.  The West is strong at not confusing us with God, at not forgetting that everything we essentially are is pure grace.  

The East, on the other hand, never forgets the immanence of the Divine, the within-ness of the Sacred.  The deeper we move in any created thing, the closer we come to the One who is the Soul within all souls, the Life within all life.  

 The West remembers the uniqueness of each individual. 

 The East knows the oneness of which we are a part.”

How beautiful if we could begin to relate to God ”outside of us” and the God “inside of us,” don’t you think?  How beautiful if we could trust in the Divine so big and so good that we would not feel threatened by the gifts other religious traditions might have to offer.  

Newell writes, “Christians have tried to hold on to Jesus, to make him exclusively ours, a Christian possession.  How can we cherish the gift of his teachings and not claim them solely as ours?”   

I am less threatened and fearful of what other traditions are teaching me than I used to be. Why?  Because I am experiencing the gifts and fruit of what they are offering.  In fact, they are enriching and expanding my experience of Jesus and the Gospel, or Good News, not the opposite.   I can see the work of the Spirit challenging not only my individual ego, but also the collective ego of my Western conditioning and worldview.  Both bring more freedom.

The Spirit seems to be at work in me most when I am committed to a true openness of heart and relationship rather than clinging, defending, closing around my theological upbringing and a Biblical perspective that is being shaken down.  There’s much to be learned and gained from the shake down.   I know this shake and quake is happening in so many others as well.   What gifts have you been given on your journey, and what are you learning?