This last Sunday I was with my grandsons at their church, and later in the afternoon the seven year old said to me that in the sermon when the priest said that God wanted our minds and our hearts, he tried to picture what that would be to take his heart out of himself to give to God. After I got over my surprise (and delight) that he had listened to the sermon, we had a talk about what that meant. In our conversation we talked about how God wants us to be aware of God’s presence in the center of our lives, that is, in our thoughts and desires and values and attitudes and intentions and feelings, all the stuff “inside” us that can’t be seen, but is a very real part of ourselves.
All this is a reminder to us preachers to be aware of how a familiar phrase might be taken, and how our religious terminology may actually obscure the meaning we want to convey. An example of this is how we use the term “People of God.” What makes us “People of God”? We then need to unpack more religious terminology: faith, grace, salvation, baptism. I myself am as guilty as the rest, for I often talk about baptismal identity in regards to meditation with the Prayer of the Lamb.
What is our personal identity, the sense of self that we configure out of our experiences, relationships and meaning framework? We see ourselves, as St. Paul would put it, “through a glass darkly,” meaning that our self-understanding is not yet mature. We read these powerful words from Romans 6 –
3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
4 Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.
5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
6 We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.
7 For whoever has died is freed from sin.
8 But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.
But these words are so much theoretical theology, unless their truth is revealed to me and I come to realize that what I had previously held as my self identity turns out actually to be a dynamic process of moving attention and self imagination rather than a solid ego, and who I am from God’s perspective is far more foundational and far more profound than can be imagined.
Our spiritual identity and status is complete salvation, liberation and freedom in Christ. This may not be obvious to us as we view our life in the world. What we see there in our human condition is that it is not yet the fullness of Christ. God sees us in Christ. We see ourselves in the world. God knows us perfectly in and through love. We know ourselves “through a glass darkly,” a mirror of the complex process of the ego through memory, judgment and aspiration:
- memory that is filtered through overlays of meanings attributed to events,
- judgment, evaluation, self-critique, the adjustments we make to our self image in response to judgments we receive from others, etc.,
- aspiration, what we want to become, and so we take steps to make ourselves that way – how we “compose” ourselves before the mirror in the morning before going out to meet the world.
The Prayer of the Lamb is one way, one spiritual discipline, one spirituality that leads from knowing ourselves in the world to knowing ourselves in Christ, that we may know ourselves as we are known. This is the realization of baptismal identity. The Prayer of the Lamb repeated in the heart brings awareness that the mercy of God is not something transferred from Jesus to us, so as to become our possession, but is ON us, as we are in Christ. Awareness grows that we are in Christ. Baptism then is understood as an ongoing state of being.
Meditate as a way to realize self-identification not with the ego process of the mind-body, but as one with Yeshua. This may seem like a small matter, but for me it shifts from what could be seen as something I work at as my own effort, and instead becomes a realization of what already is. Meditation is a way to dissolve the ego process, but I am not the one doing the dissolving. And when something is dissolved or melts away, what is revealed is not something new coming into being, but what has always been the truth.
While we do want to further the spiritual process at work in us of becoming instruments of God's love or peace or life, there is the possibility that we will cause ourselves frustration in that we are working at building a stronger ego that can boast of its spiritual accomplishments. In truth all our efforts are vain, empty, filthy rags (as Paul puts it). The more we pray the Prayer of the Lamb the more we come to see this, and the more we cry out for mercy, and the more open we are then to the real work of meditation (which is the Spirit's work, not ours). When we sit in silence with the Prayer, we are opening to our own demise. We are open to the risk of the dissolution of the illusion of our own egos, as there is awakening to just what this new identity in Christ is. Thus we can see how everything is flowing from the Father and returning to the Father.
Keep meditating!
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