Either make the tree good
Jesus had to say and
The tree’s fruit good or
Make the tree corrupt
And the tree’s fruit corrupt

Walk the walk

For the tree’s known
By its fruit, Jesus had
To say–Oh, generation
Of snakes how can you
Speak good things?
Jesus had to say to

The speakers of two
Sides of their mouths
For out of
The abundance
Of the heart
The mouth speaks

The spirit of the Azusa Street Revival, credited with beginning the modern Pentecostal movement, was still very much alive when I was a kid. Old folks could still go into rapturous revery just thinking back on those days of 1906. And with six-hundred million people now considered Pentecostal, I think it’s safe to say Azusa Street was the most important religious happening of the Twentieth Century.

Azusa Street grew out of the “entire sanctification” or “holiness” movement among Southern Methodists, based in the belief that seekers can go beyond the initial conversion experience, “glory to glory in the spirit,” as 2 Corinthians would have it.

Nowadays I’m less taken by the complete sanctification theology of Azusa Street than by the miracle it wrought in the “original sin” of the United States, racism.

African American preacher William J. Seymour was the center of the revival, which brought together, in a time of complete segregation, black, white, Latino, Asian, male, female, rich, and poor. Faithfully following Galatians 3:28,

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,

Pentecostals desegregated churches in the Jim Crow South of my youth. And women preached just like the men. Though its gains were largely snuffed out by later shifts to the political right among poor whites, for at least sixty years Azusa Street redefined life among the poor in the United States. I still feel its fire, all these years later. And I know it is possible for everyone and anyone to be “changed into the glory of the Lord, glory to glory, through the Spirit.”

The cliche is true–your image of God creates you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azusa_Street_Revival

Prologue

Compassion and justice are the core of spiritual practice.

When we know with all our heart, soul, and being that all that is deserves compassion and justice, our only choice is to be compassionate and just beings.

When we know with all our heart, soul, and being that all that is is deeply and inextricably woven together, our only choice is work with and for compassion and justice.

Spiritual integrity is to act compassionately and justly.

The universe is not a monarchy.

Purpose

One way to know a position is misguided is that it needs to be defended.

The inherent worth and dignity of every person does not need to be defended. It is a truth.

That all that is is woven in an inextricable web of mutuality does not need to be defended. It is a truth.

Human purpose is to realized and act on truths.

To live in integrity with all that is, we must act for the good of all that is. Much of all that is is viewed in worldly—non-spiritual—comprehension as Other—whether that be mineral, animal, human. Spiritual integrity means that there is no Other; spiritual practice is liberation of self in order to compassionately liberate all.

There is no Other.

Ends and Means

The questions—the breakdown of unassailable truths—lie in the means of achieving justice and compassion. Here is where we must begin the hard work of listening to one other. Respecting the inherent worth and dignity of one other.

The end is compassion and justice.

The means is compassion and justice.

The end is integrity, compassion, non-violence, and oneness with all that is.

The means is integrity, compassion, non-violence and oneness with all that is.

Action produces conflict; the challenge is to direct conflict toward the goal of liberation.

The past is past; the past is prologue; the now is the locus of action.

Relationship, relationship, relationship. Right relation. Relationship.

There is good spiritual discipline in seeing the water we swim in. Yet fish can’t change their water. They are likely to accept it as “the nature of things” or to say the water is disgusting—yet necessarily continue to swim in it.

First we must see. Then we must act. Both seeing and acting are continuous spiritual practice.

The spiritual practice is not working for a vague tomorrow. The spiritual practice is embodying compassion and justice each moment. Living in the Beloved Community means embodying it. Liberation of all that is.

The Value of Thought and Belief

Of what use is a teaching or a practice that does not lead to action?

Of what use is a spiritual experience that does not lead to change in behavior?

If you are convinced you that you are a frog, but you don’t try to jump, what is your conviction?

If you are convinced that compassion and justice are the purpose of life, yet you do not live for compassion and justice, what has changed?

Here’s another moral truth: you can believe in the best of actions yet still act in a morally reprehensible manner.

Only those thoughts that trigger action have validity. Thought and belief have no meaning outside of action.

We must live fully within our spiritual tradition, with constant practice, practice leading to action. Constant motion.

Next Steps

You must change your life.

Love neither the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of God is not in that person. For all that is in the world, the desire of the flesh, and the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of God, but is of the world.  And the world passes away, and the desires thereof. But the one who does the will of God abides forever. (2:15-17)

Sounds harsh, doesn’t it? Or the same-‘ol- same-‘ol. I read these verses at recent study group, with much eye rolling and many groans in response. Yes, sounds harsh and old fashioned. More of that “hate the flesh” stuff.

But think about it: How to express the spiritual truth that our egos—our everyday, mundane sense of self—is the barrier to a sense of wonder and gratitude, to an experience of the divine? Early Christians, as they fanned out across a world soaked in Greek dualism—a view of reality as separated between material and spirit—came down hard on the side of spirit. Yet, how else could the author of John have said it? He was in his culture, attempting to speak of the ineffable. 

A bit farther east, the author of the Tao Teh Ching said,

Body and mind embrace.

With attention to the breath,

We can become gentle;

With attention to thoughts

We can clear away flaws. (10)

This explicit non-dualism appeals to our contemporary minds. Yet, though the goal appears to be different, notice that the idea is similar to John’s, “For all that is in the world, the desire of the flesh, and the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of God, but is of the world.  And the world passes away, and the desires thereof.” Breathe—be gentle—pay attention—clear away the flaws. For both writers, the goal is to get through the ego stuff that gets in the way of an understanding of oneness.

The human situation is that from moment to moment, day to day, for what amounts to a lifetime, each of us feels those “intimations of immortality” that poet William Wordsworth talks about. We know there’s more, more that we can feel a part of, yet the desire for the little mores all around us—the desires of the senses and the fears of the flesh—distracts from the achievement of the big more.

How to go through the self to “break on through to the other side” is the question. For some religious traditions, this means examining the mind; for others, it means a reliance on the divine. In both, the essence of our work is going beyond our little selves to a place of connection and compassion for all.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says,

When you make the two one, you will come to be the Children of Humanity. Then, if you should say, “mountain, move away,” it will move. (#106)

Going beyond duality is a powerful step. It means, as the Dalai Lama points out, to make our religion compassion for all.

The resulting population explosion contributes to the escape of the Hebrew slaves to freedom. The message is clear: the “rightful” civil authority, in this case Pharaoh, should be disobeyed when the law contradicts sacred law. Shiphrah and Puah, two brave women, stage the first instance of civil disobedience recorded in what became the Bible: when the law of God and the law of man conflict, the choice is clear.

The story of the brave women who would not cooperate with an unjust king came up again in Puritan England. The text was used as justification for opposing the king. This is why the King James Version of the Bible has no footnotes: King James knew that his predecessor had found himself dead based on Puritan readings of certain verses, Exodus 1:15-20 chief among them. No commentary allowed. No discussion allowed concerning divine agreement with civil disobedience.

May the story of two brave women always make the powerful quake. May their bravery and humor continue down the years.

Text:

The king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, one named Shiphrah and the other  Puah, saying, “When you served as midwives to the Hebrew women and see them upon the birth stools, if they deliver a son, kill him. But if it is a daughter, let her live.”

But the midwives served God, and so did not do as the king of Egypt had commanded them, saving the lives of the males as well.

So the king of Egypt called for the midwives to him and said, “Why have you done this, saving the lives of the male children?”

The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are lively and deliver their babies before midwives arrive.”

For this, God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and grew very mighty.

You weeping will laugh; blessed
Are you shunned and cast out;
Imagine the news that
Its woe for the rich,
For they have got theirs;

That it’s woe for the well-fed
Because hunger’s on its way;
Imagine the news that
The laughing ones will weep;

That’s the good news but
Imagine the news
That all you have to do

Is love your enemy;
That all you have to do
Is good to those who
Curse you, and pray

For those who curse you
And turn, and turn
The other cheek and give
And give to all who ask.

Imagine the news that
That is the way.

“When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit upon the throne of his glory, and before him will gather all nations. He will separate them one from another, just as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats.

He will set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right hand, ‘Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was a hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in; naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you visited me; I was in prison and you came to me.’

Then the righteous will answer saying, “Master, when did we see you hungry and fed you? Or thirsty and gave you drink? When did we see you stranger and took you in? or naked and clothed you? Or when did we see you sick, or in prison, and came to you?’

The King will answer, ‘Truly I tell you, inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these my sisters and brothers, you have done it to me.’

Then he will also say to those on his left hand, “Get away from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was a hungry and you gave me no food; I was thirsty and you gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and you did not take me in; naked and you did not clothe me; sick, in prison, and you did not visit me.’

Then they will say, “Master, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’

The master will answer, “Truly I tell you, inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’ Thus these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Amen.

Like most Christians, I have recited this prayer thousands of times from memory—in church; at the bedsides of the sick; over the bodies of the dead; even, sometimes, just for the heck of it. The words are, as the saying goes, etched in the mind.

The prayer comes with, if you will, many after-market products: two thousand years of preaching on the subject; and thousands if not tens of thousands of books on the meaning of the prayer. But look at the words. What are we praying for here?

There are four “asks” in the prayer:

1.

Thy Kingdom come.
Thy will be done in earth,
As it is in heaven.

2.

Give us this day our daily bread.

3.

And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive them that trespass against us.

4.

And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.

First out of the box, we pray for the coming of God’s kingdom, which is defined not as the end of the world but as the will of God occurring on the earth. The kingdom of God, the Beloved Community.

The second ask is for simple sustenance. Making it.

The third ask is for forgiveness of our own shortcomings, contingent upon our ability to forgive others (how’s that for a spiritual exercise?).

Note that the version quoted here is from the Book of Common Prayer. The King James text on which the prayer is based phrases the lines,
And forgive us our debts,
as we forgive our debtors.

The fourth ask is for the avoidance of the materialistic temptations that plagued the Rich Man.

The context for this version of the prayer is the Sermon on the Mount. The prayer also appears in the Gospel According to Luke where it reads,

And it came to pass, that, as Jesus was praying in a certain place, when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Master, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.”

And Jesus said to them,
“When you pray, say,
Our Father which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
As in heaven, so in earth.
Give us day by day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins;
for we also forgive every one
that is indebted to us.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us from evil.
(11:1-4)

Admittedly, the Matthew version is more elegant. The asks are the same in both texts, however, and the first remains a wish to bring the will of God to the earth and to our immediate experience. What the prayer asks for is pretty immediate!–the coming of Beloved Community; sustenance; reciprocal forgiveness; and the avoidance of actions based on desire rather than compassion.

So may it be!

The high-fallutin word “noumenal” is based on nous, the Greek word often translated as “mind.” The word occurs once in the Gospels, Luke 24:45, “Then he (Jesus) opened their minds to understand the scriptures” (NRSV). Interestingly enough, “nous” in this passage is singular—“mind,” not “minds.” The King James Version says, “Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.”  I suspect that the author of Luke was not confused in using nous in the singular—the author wished to communicate mind as one, the truth being realized by the disciples was in Luke’s understanding a universal truth.

Nous is the capacity to understand an overarching spiritual—or other non-physical—truth. Contrasted with nous is phenos, from which we get the English word phenomenon—an observable fact. This word does not occur in the Gospels.

The intuition that the world is not as it appears is central to many human religions.  Taoism teaches that the human ability to grasp the reality behind phenomena is impossible, even though there IS one there:

The way that can be walked

Is not The Way (“Tao”).

A name that can be named

Is not the lasting name.

Another Taoist text, the Hua Hu Ching, says, “When all words are exhausted, the truth appears.” This is enough to give Western thinkers the heebie-jeebies. 

Jack Kerouac, a Roman Catholic mystic and student of Buddhism, put it this way:

Discard such definite imaginations of phenomena as your own self, thou human being, thou’rt a numberless mass of sun-motes: each mote a shrine. The same as to your shyness of other selves, selfness as divided into infinite numbers of beings, or selfness as identified as one self existing eternally. Be obliging and noble, be generous with your time and help and possessions, and be kind, because the emptiness of this little place of flesh you carry around and call your soul, your entity, is the same emptiness in every direction of space unmeasurable emptiness, the same, one, and holy emptiness everywhere: why be selfy and unfree, Man God, in your dream? Wake up, thou’rt selfless and free. “Even and upright your mind abides nowhere,” states Hui Neng of China. We’re all in heaven now. (from The Scripture of the Golden Eternity)

The Western world has wrestled with the idea of a reality beyond the seen in a different manner than the Eastern, which has tended to marginalize mystical thought in the Western world, to the point that Christianity is often interpreted as a religion based on magic—physically raising from the dead, physical miracles, and such—rather than a mental and psychological discipline. This magical element is also one reason many have rejected Christianity. (Again with the either/ors!) Yet there are hints of a different understanding of ultimate reality here and there in Western texts. For example, in Saying #111 of the Gospel of Thomas Jesus says,

The heavens and the earth will be rolled up in front of you; those who live out of the One who lives, those will not see death.  As I have said, whoever discovers the world is superior to the world.

Rather than being a description of a day when the earth will roll up, this sounds like a noumenal understanding to me. And who or what is “The One”? Ah!

A name that can be named

Is not the lasting name.

For most human religions, this humbleness is both the beginning and ultimate goal of religious practice—we must break down the ego in order to see the truth our our interconnectedness with all that is.  In Taoism, for instance, awakening to The Way is just this realization of dependence followed by a life spent aligning the self with “The Way of heaven.”

Rather than a dependence upon reality itself as reflected in the natural world, Christianity has to often reflected a feeling of dependence on God alone—an abstract god beyond this world—and this has often in practice meant a dependence on God for things spiritual but not physical. Yet in the Gospel According to Luke, Jesus makes the physical connection explicit, saying, “seek the kingdom of God, and you will be given these things”—these things being the necessities for survival (Luke 12:31).

A feeling of dependence and a sense of gratitude ties us to this world, whether this world brings abundant grace or truckloads of want. This dependence and gratitude are the deepest of spiritual practices. In this teaching Jesus goes on to say,   

Think about it: Who can add an inch to his or her height by thinking? If you cannot do something so small, why bother about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they flourish—they do not work; they do not spin—yet I tell you that Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these. So, if God clothes the grass so well, which is in the field today and tomorrow is burned in the oven, how much more will God clothe you, oh you of little faith? Do not wonder about what you will eat or what you will drink; do not have a doubtful mind.

(Luke 12:27-29)

In Saying #42 of the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus sums it up nicely: “Be by passing by.”

A little poem of mine:

The Tao of Kicking

 Kick the can

Down the road

You are the can

You are the road

That’s the kicker