Cyprian, Bishop and Martyr of Carthage, 258
In his treatise, On the Lord’s Prayer, he wrote: “We say ‘Hallowed by thy Name,’ not that we want God to be made holy by our prayers, but because we seek from the Lord that his Name may be made holy in us, … so that we who have been made holy in Baptism may persevere in what we have begun to be.”
John 1:12
But to all who received him, who believed in his Name, he gave power to become children of God
When I first began to practice meditational prayer, it was with an intense desire to draw closer to Jesus. As with many others, these early days of meditation were filled with beautiful experiences of divine grace and mercy. They kept me engaged in the practice, a clever divine “trick,” it would seem, to ensure that in cultivating an open heart the real underlying work of transformation would take place. I had no idea where I was going.
But my ignorance about the path, the purpose, the process at work within me through the Resurrection Spirit of Jesus, didn’t matter. The work of personal transformation does not belong to the individual disciple being as earnest or devoted as possible. The work is done in spite of ourselves.
After awhile when many of the beautiful spiritual experiences faded away, I got a much clearer picture of my own ignorance in trying to draw closer to Jesus. How could I? I was already as close as I would ever be. That is, sooner or later it dawns on us that when we are baptized into Christ, we are baptized into Christ. We are in Christ, in Yeshua, in the Heart and Mind of the Creator. There is no separation, there never was, and we can trust that. What a relief!
Well, maybe that’s a relief. For now the time spent sitting is not brimming with colorful mental connections popping with profound insights. Instead the real work of transformation, actual change and healing at the core of being, seems to be taking place. It seems like it must be the real work, because in this experience of the meditation time, what comes up has a lot less to do with my agenda, what I think God should work on in me, and a lot more of looking in a mirror at the ways I manage my own self-limiting reactivity to the world around me in contrast with an expansiveness of awareness or consciousness that seems to be limitless precisely because it carries nothing of my agenda, or anything that can be designated by a first person possessive pronoun. In this expansiveness of consciousness there is a free flow of life that is sheer grace, easy as pie, a free ride, and is not veiled by ego.
So I look at the rest of life activities, everything going on when I’m not sitting on my cushion dryly reciting the Prayer of the Lamb over and over silently, always on the watch for where in the midst of the hustle and bustle is that same expansiveness of consciousness. It’s when there is self-forgetting, when “I” get out of the way. And not unexpectedly, it’s when “I” disappears in the process of serving others and serving creation in any of a myriad of ways. The attention is directed outward from self, is engaged in the other, and is seeing this other being as naturally part and parcel with self. And lo and behold, this “ecological” perspective on life is the very thing that leads to awakening more and more fully to my own baptismal identity with Christ. Not by attending to myself has ANY spiritual breakthrough come, not by any personal achievement, but by attending to others in given connectedness with self comes the realization that through the Name of Yeshua transformation is at work. What joy!
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