"Had" by God

I accepted Christ when I was 7 years old and I still love Him. What I don’t love are the absurd beliefs of fundamentalist ‘Christians.’ While I don’t consider myself a Christian, Buddhist or any ian or ist, there is another way…

“The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection — and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth. This is what makes Jesus so counterintuitive to most eras and cultures, and why most never perceived the great good news in this utter shift of consciousness. That failure to understand his core message, and a concrete program by which you could experience this truth for yourself, is at the center of our religious problem today. We looked for hope where it was never promised, and no one gave us the proper software so we could know hope for ourselves, least of all in disorder and imperfection! Worst of all, we did not know that hope and union are the same thing, and that real hope has nothing to do with mental certitudes.

If you surrender to the fear of uncertainty, life can become a set of insurance policies. Your short time on this earth becomes small and self-protective, a kind of circling of the wagons around what you can be sure of and what you think you can control — even God. It provides you with the illusion that you are in the driver’s seat, navigating on safe, small roads, and usually in a single, predetermined direction that can take you only where you have already been. For far too many people, no life journey is necessary because we think we already have all our answers at the beginning. “The church says,… the Bible says, etc.”

A second group tries a different approach. They choose to whistle in the dark, look the other way, or just keep busy — seeking various ways of being important, or as Jesus put it, trying to “build bigger barns.” For them, life becomes a series of manufactured dramas, entertainment, and diversionary tactics intended to help them avoid the substantial questions. Here, what some call intensity is frequently an avoidance of what I will call presence — intimacy with ourselves, with life, and with others. This avoidance is symbolized by what we call the consumer culture, which in our current economic situation appears to be falling apart. This group also represents a large percentage of humanity, especially in the developed world. Governments encourage this pacification by various distractions, what used to be called “bread and circuses.” They know it will keep us small, content, and uninterested in those “weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and good faith” (Matthew 23:23) that have attracted all great souls.

A third group does seek various forms of transcendence and spirituality, but in a mixture of mature and immature ways… Unfortunately, so much religious seeking today is immature transcendence, dualistically split off from any objective experience of union with God, self, or others — what Owen Barfield would have called “the desert of nonparticipation.” If it is authentically experienced, Christianity is the overcoming of the split from God’s side once and for all! Sadly, most of us remain split inside of a heady set of formulas and religious jargon, a place where deep constant hope cannot be found — to say nothing of joy. We need to leave the desert for a much better land, a “final participation” that can be partially enjoyed now.

Mature transcendence is an actual “falling into” and an “undergoing” of God, as James Alison so brilliantly names it. God is “done unto us,” and all we can do is allow it, as both the similar prayers of Mary at the Annunciation and Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane make clear. What we fall into is what Christianity would call both “an abyss” and an “utter foundation.” What a paradox! But in God, they are not opposites. When we do get there, we almost wonder how we got there. We know we did not do anything nearly as much as we know we were done unto. We are being utterly and warmly held and falling helplessly into a scary mystery at the very same time — caught between profound desire and the question, “Where is this going to take me?”

It has been said many times that, after transformation, you seldom have the feeling you have found anything. It feels much more like Someone found you! You find yourself having been grabbed, being held, and being Someone’s beloved. At first, you do not even know what is going on. All you know is that it is a most wondrous undergoing, but an undergoing nevertheless. You know you have been “had” (see Jeremiah 20:7–9 or Isaiah 6:4–7). You are in Someone Else’s grip. How else will anybody freely and rightly give up control? They won’t. They’ll use religion itself as a disguised way of taking control, or try to control God by their good behavior.

Finally you allow yourself to stand before one mirror for your identity — you surrender to the naked now of true prayer and full presence. You become a Thou before the great I AM. Such ultimate mirroring gives you the courage to leave other mirrors behind you. “Human approval means nothing to me,” Jesus said. “Why do you waste time looking to one another for approval when you have the approval that comes from the One God?” (John 5:41, 44). Henceforward, as Teresa of Avila said, “You find God in yourself and yourself in God,” a discovery that precedes, outdoes, and undercuts all of the best psychology in the world. Think of the thousands of dollars you can save in therapy! Most people in our whimsical culture live in a hall of mirrors, and so we find ourselves with fragile and rapidly changing identities, needing a lot of affirmation. We see this especially in so many young people. Their identities are built on feelings, moods, and ideas that are easily manipulated by everything around them, including advertising and its selling of superficial images.

You have been given something so much better, so much more joyful and more substantial than that! Divine presence, and the faith, hope, and love that accompany it, are a gift — you cannot control it — but nevertheless a gift that can and should be asked for (Luke 11:13). Asking for something from God does not mean talking God into it; it means an awakening of the gift within ourselves. You only ask for something you have already begun to taste! The gift has already been given. Most people, quite sadly and with disastrous consequences, do not know that the gift is already theirs. The teachers of the early Christian centuries, along with many of the later saints and mystics, were clear about this. Yet most Christians today still seem to be like the citizens of Ephesus in apostolic days, saying in effect, “We did not even know there was such a thing as the Holy Spirit” (Acts 19:2).

It’s true that you cannot risk telling people with an immature or dualistic consciousness about the Great Indwelling before they have actually experienced it, because they will always abuse it or trivialize it for purposes of superiority, libertinism, or control. This is probably what Jesus meant by one of his more offensive images, “throwing pearls before swine” (Matthew 7:6). At the same time, we surely did not have to deny it or keep it such a big secret! Perhaps this occurred because many of the clergy had themselves never experienced divine union and so could not teach others about it. Catholics and Orthodox make the Holy Spirit depend on membership and sacraments; Protestants make the Spirit depend on a personal decision or faith as a technique. In both cases, we are back in charge; we are the doers. There is no undergoing.”

~ Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See