Loving God for nothing

...It was rather the discovery of something central to the life of prayer...

...We say it easily, half paying attention...

...JOHN GARVEY...

...Does any of us know what a human being is...

...he subject has never been addressed more creatively or movingly...

...We are not aware enough of consciousness itself, or how it works, or the ways in which ego can use religion and religious language to shore itself up and protect itself from the implications of the words we use too eas-ily...

...Thomas Merton's fascination with Buddhism was not, as some conservatives have suggested, a decadent turn taken by a rebellious monk...

...Any spirituality must, in the Quaker phrase, "speak to our condition" to be genuinely helpful, but it is easy to be distracted from learning what that condition is...

...I am not sure that we have the equipment to recognize a fully realized human being...

...The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing says that the most pious and holy thoughts are dangerous distractions at a certain point, and he encourages a deliberate forgetting, and a knowledge that God is unknowable "except by love...

...This could seem to be a recommendation of individualistic soul-polishing and a turning away from communal concerns...

...But it is made to seem less worldly by the ego, because it is'' spiritual.'' The desire to be perceived by others or, more insidiously, to perceive ourselves as holy, or good, or wise, is as limiting and foolish as the desire to be thought sexually attractive or financially powerful...

...Take the rather common experience of feeling misunderstood, or of being offended somehow...

...Religion can be another form of noise, joining politics and psychology and television and best-sellers in the swarm of distractions we present ourselves with constantly...

...We forget how strange it would be to hear the words of the Gospel fresh...

...But at another stage it may be crucial to let go of the picture, or to get out of the armor...

...We must recover the strangeness of their original proclamation...

...Here the danger is in replacing one suit of armor with another, more subtly designed: the need to make spiritual progress and to know that we are doing so can, in Chogyam Trungpa's words, be a form of "spiritual materialism" which is every bit as crass as the desire to own a new car...

...Similar approaches to spirituality can be found in the West...

...for he wants nothing, seeks nothing, and has no reason for doing anything...

...We can resent our situation and insist on our righteousness or on our innocence...

...You bring the mind back, and within seconds it's gone again...

...but any attachment I have to the need to be right has nothing at all to do with my love for the truth...

...But before this can happen we have to know how stonyhearted we are, or else we will simply admire the poetry of Ezekiel, which is not what Ezekiel is for...

...We are driven by it and led around by it, until we can see it...

...The desire to possess the right kind of spirituality, he suggests, can be every bit as materialistic as the desire to own a car or a new refrigerator...

...What do we lose, or think we will lose, if we are not seen precisely as we would like to be seen...

...He describes something which comes star-tlingly close to the Buddhist ideal: "The just man loves God for nothing, neither for this nor for that, and if God gave him wisdom or anything else he had to give, except himself, the just man would not look at it, nor would it be to his taste...

...What we are is not necessarily what we think we are...

...What is called for is an intense listening, a stillness in the face of our feelings...

...As life lives on for its own sake, needing no reason for being, so the just man has no reason for doing what he does'' (Meister Eckhart, translated by R.P...

...The words of the creed inspire hope...

...At the beginning of Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Shambhala) Chbgyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist now working from Boulder's Naropa Institute, writes, "We have come here to learn about spirituality...

...This isn't meant to discourage us...

...But the most vital crisis is one which has been with the church since its beginning: it is learning to hear the words of the Gospel as pointed and personal, aimed at the heart...

...Go to the depths of the soul, the secret place of the Most High, to the roots, to the heights...

...The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality...

...But even these hopes and the need for meaning rise like bubbles in a kind of mental soup which boils constantly without our being aware of it...

...They include the church's role in social transformation, the role of women in the church, lay ministries, and there are many others...

...It isn't...

...we are secure and at home with a message which leaves us with nothing to be secure about, and invites us to a way of life in which security, as a pursuit, must be left behind...

...What is it in us that Jesus addresses when he says that we must lose our lives in order to find them...

...What would that be like...

...It isn't that right or wrong do not matter...

...for all that God can do is focused there...

...What is it in us that is transformed, or is even capable of being transformed...

...Our attachment to any of these things, including any need I might feel to be right about what I am writing this minute, has to be seen for what it is: the ego's way of holding on to us, to protect itself...

...Ego is constantly trying to acquire and apply the teachings of spirituality for its own benefit . . .In order to reassure ourselves, we work to fit into our intellectual scheme every aspect of our lives which might be confusing...

...In Ezekiel God says, "I will take away your hearts of stone and give you hearts of flesh...

...Each Sunday along with a church full of other people I recite a creed in which I say that God became human...

...We need a spirituality in which the daily conditions of marriage, family, friendship, work, and social struggle become a school of spirituality...

...There is only one way to find out: you sit down, try to be quiet (which means quieting the body as well as the mind) and concentrate on a few words - a short prayer, a line from one of the psalms...

...it is at least as much a danger to the theologian as it is to the layman...

...we can't wait until all of our motives are clear before we do anything...

...Within a few minutes you are thinking of a hamburger, or something that needs to be done, or a conversation you might be having with someone...

...We would not be bearable company if in our coming to maturity we had not been civilized by a system of goads and rewards...

...What is it in us that scripture addresses when we are told to leave everything to follow Christ...

...Basil said that anyone who claimed to know God was depraved, and Meister Eckhart wrote of the Godhead beyond God...

...But above all each of us must try to be clear about prayer...

...As God, having no motives, acts without them, so the just man acts without motives...

...They encourage us to believe a number of things: that lives which involve suffering and joy are not without meaning, and this meaning is somehow rooted in the compassion of God - whatever God may be, whatever we are...

...When it is attacked it matters more than anything in the world that we hold on to it and keep it from being damaged...

...I don't mean that laymen may be seduced into thinking that they know what only qualified theologians really know...

...We ordinarily react to them...

...We have the desire to love, coupled with a complete inability to do so, and at the same time our greatest passion may be buried resentment or anger...

...It is a directness which we need desperately...

...I trust the genuine quality of this search but we must question its nature...

...We are trying to keep in place a picture of the self which serves not only as a self-portrait (and a flattering one at that) but also as a shield...

...Religious language can become so interesting that we forget what it is for, or so familiar that we imagine we know...

...There has been a lot written and said about the church's current "state of crisis," and at the level of church politics there is something to the notion...

...it is a mercy to see it, to know our emptiness and our need...

...But the social implications of Christianity are addressed frequently these days, and our radical need for a living spirituality is not...

...Blakney, Harper...

...If you are tired you may find yourself close to dreaming...

...There are many problems and controversies which properly concern us...

...At one age we need a self-image which can be shamed into decent behavior or encouraged by praise...

...Merton was aware that this could be found in Western spirituality, but was unafraid of the East's direct approach...

...Buddhism looks without either hope or despair, and certainly without sentimentality, at the phenomenon of awareness itself, and in the process it deals with problems which have everything to do with spirituality...

...What you are not matters deeply: the process of trying to pray can reveal how empty and cold-hearted we really are...

...it is certainly not simply the sum of our feelings and aspirations...

...in a way they serve a valuable function: they show you what really leads you through a day, what you really care about, what you are and are not...

...Can't we live without it...

...We become comfortable with language which is meant to move us away from what we regard as comfort...

...One recent book which does an excellent job of connecting the personal and social aspects of spirituality is Compassion (Doubleday), by Donald McNeill, Douglas Morrison, and Henri Nouwen...

...it is important instead to pay attention to them without being led by them...

...Or we can explore what it is in us that is wounded...

...The most basic question is, who is it that sits down to pray...

...We affirm belief in a God none of us can possibly imagine, and say that this unknowable one became a human being, which is to Say that someone unimaginable became a sort of creature we do not understand...

...Irenaeus said that the glory of God is man, fully realized...

...It may lead us to think that we know what we are talking about...

...it may be an impediment to spiritual growth...

...Eckhart said, "To get at the core of God at his greatest, one must first get into the core of himself at his least, for no one can know God who has first not known himself...

...It doesn't help to be terribly strenuous in fighting these distractions...

...And our effort is so serious and solemn, so straightforward and sincere, that it is difficult to be suspicious of it...

...They move us at obscure levels...