On saying "I am God" +

Join me in a prayer of St Ephrem - Lord, shed upon our darkened souls the brilliant light of your wisdom so that we may be enlightened to serve you with renewed purity. As sunrise marks the hour for men to begin their toil, in our souls, prepare us for the day that will never end.

A clergy family once decided to let their three-year-old son record the message for their home answering machine, and the rehearsals went well: “Mummy and Daddy can’t come to the phone right now. If you’ll leave your name, phone number, and a brief message, they’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

Then came the test. Father pressed the record button and their son said slowly: “Mummy and Daddy can’t come to the phone right now. If you’ll leave your name, phone number, and a brief message, they’ll get back to you as soon as Jesus comes.”

Children, and we would all be children at heart, do the funniest things. My two year old over here apparently answered a doorbell ring by opening the door, looking at the two visitors silently, closing the door on them, and walking back into the lounge to say: “I don’t like them.”


But we children learn what we are taught. As very small children we even need to be told we are the reflection in the mirror, when at that point in life we still know very well, that the reflection in the mirror isn’t who we are at all, it is really just another thing in the world. Who here wasn’t once held and asked who is that in the mirror? Maybe we were right when we thought that reflection was just another thing in the world, not our own centre.

It is that centre we will now discover. Will you join me?

Look into a mirror. Do you see a public identity, the person, who is at a distance, a thing who is always a few feet’s distance away from you, the face others see, or the private being who sees from the centre, at zero distance.

Isn’t it a public identity, rather than who you are?

Now point at something in front of you – see how it has colour and shape. Move your finger slowly back towards you, past your legs and body, more colour and shape, until it points back at the one who is looking – do you see any colour or shape now? Do you see any thing at all? Or are you the invisible seer, spacious capacity, eternal soul, indefinable awareness, boundless, timeless being, at the centre of all?

Now touch your head, and for other people around you it looks like you are touching who you really are, but for you, isn’t it more like you are feeling some sensations in an unbounded space which is capacity for sensations?

Now point at yourself once again, look at your finger, and turn both from side to side. Does it look like you are moving, or does it look like you are staying still while the world, including your body and finger, is moving?

The point is this - I am still at the centre because I am the centre, and not a thing in the world at all. I am, because I am is the very name of God in the Bible.

Be like children and you enter the Kingdom of God, Jesus said. Perhaps he knew Children ask the best questions, like: “Why is there something, and not just nothing?” Childhood is too short for us to be the child we ought to, so we can also ask, if we still have any sense of wonder left at all: “Why is there something, not just nothing?” The answer is, of course - that is that it is a given world.

We didn’t invent it in a laboratory and we can’t buy it in a shop. It is a given, a present. There is both bad news and good news with this. The bad news is that there's nothing we can do to deserve it. And the good news is, well, there’s nothing we can do to deserve it. It is a gift.

I don’t know if you have ever seen the film City of Angels, but if not, I do recommend it to you. In the midst of the film, a cardiothoracic surgeon is holding a man’s heart in her hands, squeezing it, fighting for his life, but he dies and she starts to wonder who it is she is actually fighting. This in turn leads her to reflect on her medical training, and she says: “After all this time, and after all this work, I suddenly have the feeling that none of this is in my hands. And if it isn’t, what can I do with that?”

There’s nothing we can do with it, because it is a given, and we can chose to respond, that’s what responsibility means, ability to respond. We don’t have to be guilty for our birth or scared of our death, and the New Testament says we are not given a spirit of fear. By changing the way we see, we see that God is everywhere, and if not seen everywhere, then God is not seen anywhere.

The world - or Kosmos, and God - or Theos, and Man - or Anthropos, can't be seen separately. The cosmotheandric vision has no single centre. The centre is as wide as the circumference.

If we accept the source who is Love and consciousness, just as God became human in Jesus, we become divine. 2 PETER 1: 2-4 says this: "Grace and peace be yours in abundance, in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, whose divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. He has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that you may escape the corruption in the world and be participants of the divine nature."

In Philippians, Christ Jesus is described as emptying himself out and not regarding equality with God as a thing to be grasped. And Matthew’s gospel also says whoever exalts him or herself is humbled, and whoever humbles him or herself is exalted. The great Meister Eckhart added: “All God asks you most pressingly is to go out of yourself, and just let God be God in you. For God will only come in, when the creature goes out.”

This creature who was born, let us face it, must also die. But until we die daily, as St Paul says, by emptying ourselves out and opening mind, heart and hands, we see things not as they actually are, but as we think they are.

Like the story of an isolated village in which an old blacksmith, who finds a young lad willing to work very hard for low pay, so immediately the smith gives his instructions to his eager lad: "Now, when I take the metal out of the fire,” he says, “I'll lay it on the anvil; and when I nod my head hit it with the hammer." So the very next day, the lad is the only blacksmith left in the village.

As childhood is too short for us, the spirit of God soon gets filled with thoughts and the other five senses, and we react to our feelings and create complexes which we come to believe we actually are. Who are we fooling?

The recent Royal Institution Christmas lectures for children were all about the human brain. The lecturer addressed an assembled audience of children and said plainly and clearly that there was simply no-one in charge, no-one inside, sitting in an armchair in mission control, running it all like one of the Numbskulls in the Beano comic.

Human beings are not human thinkings anyway. No-one being in the brain is a divine mystery. It points to a secret Christians call the Kingdom of God. And we all know the best place to hide any secret is the last place anyone would ever want to look for it, in our own nothingness.

No one wants to hear about nothingness, because it’s too simple, and we creatures prefer to be clever. But with nothingness, there’s nothing to congratulate yourself for, no dressing it up, nothing to grasp. Christian dogma has the whole universe coming out of nothing, and so our own nothingness is not only full but gloriously Christian.

The Franciscan word is ‘poverty’, the Carmelite word is nada, nihil, Jesus spoke of the desert, a place we are voluntarily under stimulated, Matthew’s gospel advises us to go into our tamei’on to pray in secret, tamei’on means closet, a hidden storage space. So if we empty ourselves, then we stop living out of other people’s response to us, and this is the space where God is.

In the Bible God is called I am, and from this space, I am not who you think I am. And I am not who you need me to be either, because I’m not even who I need myself to be. I am not the reflection you see. I am nothing, and therefore in a good place to receive everything from God.

In Colossians Paul calls this “who you are, in Christ, hidden in God”. Our biggest temptation is to fill this nothing up with some thing, any thing, any image, just as long as we can own it and manage it. It is not for us to create God. St John says no-one has ever seen God, and there are no big men in the sky, but in our own absence there is an eternal Self bigger than our own imagination.

Grasping at God is like trying to make your own hair or your own nails grow, or ordering your thyroid gland to work, it can’t be done. Try it. It doesn’t work. We didn’t invent God, we can’t buy God, and unfortunately for sermon writers like me, our finest story of God is unspoken. Jesus says in Mark 4: “Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all things are done in parables, stories.”

So the Kingdom of God is in the heart or at the centre. Christian life is not about rules, but about attitudes cultivated by the divine spirit, and the fulfillment of this process is entry into eternal life, participation in the nature of eternal God. That is good news throughout the universe, the eternal Christ en-fleshed in Jesus, making it known to all created souls in ways we can’t imagine.

And when we gather as the Church, we form just one form of the Kingdom of God, the Republic of Ultimate Reality, the Realm of an unlimited uncreated potential. It is a very ambiguous form - because people, being creatures, rather than receiving nothing, have a strange anxiety they have to get involved in and captured by something, grasp at life, even Church life, which is a gift.

You may have seen a news report over Christmas showing Armenian and Orthodox priests in the Church of the Nativity fighting one another with their brooms, throwing brooms at each other, hitting one another around the head with brooms. It was like Father Ted, but it wasn’t a comedy. Can you imagine it happening now?

But it does happen. Animosity happens in the Church, and it was the same in Jesus’ day. Our gospel says he entered the synagogue and commanded unclean spirits to be silent. We might not talk about unclean spirits or gnashing teeth or outer darkness like he did, but psycho-somatic patterns, sub personalities, fear managers, identifying with the creations in the mirror, with pride, with thinking, with being something rather than just nothing, one uncreated spirit of God, who contains all.

Imagine we all live under a large board full of empty holes, with lights shining in from above, in and down through these holes. This is how we might think we are, all underneath God, as we look up through the holes, at the light coming down to us. But the holes are our souls, and the light is God, and once in our nothingness, we can actually go up through the hole, and then into God’s side.

You might think this is impossible for us, but it isn’t for God who is in us, the nothing in our something, the gift in what seems to be our very own life. So there is a much better form of the Kingdom of God, much less ambiguous than the Church, because it consists only of sincere commitment to the living spirit, who isn’t a thing.


To paraphrase the sermon on the mount, the better form of the Kingdom of God consists only of those sincerely committed in this living spirit, who are un-attached, who are not grieving what must pass, but who are seeking to comfort those who do grieve, rejoicing at another’s good fortune, not requiring deference, not being superior, but seeking justice for the oppressed, welfare for all, mercy for the weak, forgiveness for those who turn from evil, loving beauty and goodness, turning from mechanical hatred and violence, pursuing what builds up, and enduring real hardship and real hostility in order to witness to supreme loving kindness and selfless love.

God draws near to liberate us from estrangement and alienation, by growing here in Church, through to here, in the heart centre, through to a third and even better form of the Kingdom of God, which is not in this world at all. It is the communion of saints, and there is no evil.

But it must keep growing even further still, back into itself, the One, the Giver of all good gifts himself, the source of all life, who is our own source and the source of the whole cosmos, who must one day raise it all back to his eternal divine nature. The gospel calls this close of the age: “te sunteleia tou aionos” and Jesus is reported as saying: “I am, with you, until the end of the age”.

So who is God if not I am? One Rabbi called God the soul of your soul. The reason we can say “I am God” is not because we are insane or egotistical, but because we chose to be nothing at all. Not a thing. Nothing can take everything else in, but if we chose to be something instead, we just shut other things out.

This not being anything means that God’s love can be what it is - all embracing, and Christians are able to rejoice that we can see it expressed on this small planet in the person of Jesus and in the Church. But any attempt to confine it to either is self defeating, like little Jamie, who is trying to use God.

Jamie says to God, God, how long is a million years to you? God says, well Jamie, a million years to me is like one second. And how much is a million pounds to you God? So God says “Jamie, it is a mere penny.” So a million years is a second, and million pounds is a penny, so Jamie then thinks and says: “God, can I have one of your pennies?” - And God replies, “just one second.”

It’s a given world, and there’s absolutely nothing at all we can do to deserve it. The Priest and spiritual guide Anthony De Mello put it like this. We depend on one another for all kinds of things. The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, which is interdependence! We set up society in this way, and it’s fine to allot different functions to different people for the welfare of all, so all can function better, live better, at least ideally, we hope.

But to depend on a person psychologically and emotionally is to depend on another for your happiness, and if you try that, whether you are aware of it or not, next you will be demanding that people contribute to your happiness. After that will come fear of loss, fear of alienation, fear of rejection, and finally mutual control.

But perfect love casts out all this fear, and in the source, at your centre, there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I don’t demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you at all. If you were to leave, I would not feel sorry for myself. I may still enjoy your company immensely, and I do, but I don’t cling to it. As I enjoy your company it is on a non-clinging basis.

Because what I REALLY enjoy isn’t you OR me, but far greater than both you AND me. It is the centre, the Kingdom, it is something I discovered, it is a symphony, an orchestra, because it plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, it doesn't stop, it just plays another one. It is gift. A gift implies a giver, who does not depend on me at all, and who never ceases, but who, as no-thing, contains each and every single thing.

Join me in a prayer of St Ephrem. Lord, shed upon our darkened souls the brilliant light of your wisdom, so that we may be enlightened to serve you with renewed purity, and as sunrise marks the hour for men to begin their toil, in our souls, prepare us for the day that will never end.

In the name of Father Son and Holy Spirit
Amen +

The cosmic Christ

One night, in a very expensive exclusive restaurant, so well attended it is fully booked a year in advance, a man is being refused a seat, but he feels far too important for this, so he shouts repeatedly at the maitre d in the lobby: “Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am!”

And just then, the maitre d happens to spot a psychiatrist on his way out of the restaurant, so he turns and says: “Excuse me sir, but would you please tell this gentleman who he is?”

To answer the question, who am I, brings the fullest rest and joy, but how will it happen? Here it is a clue described by the character Edmund, in an otherwise very depressing play by Eugene O’Neill, called ‘Long day’s journey into night’.

“When I was on the squarehead, a square rigger bound for Buenos Aires, full moon in the trades, old hooker driving forth in knots, I lay on the bough stead facing the stern with the water foaming into spewm under me, the mast with every sail white in the moonlight towering high above me.

I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself, I actually lost my life. I was set free, I dissolved. I became sea, became moonlight, and the ship and the high dim starred sky. I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy.

I belonged within something greater than my own life or the life of humans, to life itself, to God, if you want to put it that way, to the joy of belonging to the fulfilment beyond man’s lousy pitiful greed and fears and hopes and dreams.

And several other times, when I was swimming far out, or alone on the beach, I have had the same experience. I became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swinging in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude, like the veil of things as they seem, drawn back by an unseen hand.

For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning, then the hand lets the veil fall again, and you are alone, lost in the fog, as you stumble on again to nowhere for no good reason.”

The answer then is that to experience who he is, Edmund loses who he is not. This is also what St Paul means when he says I live, yet it is not I, but Christ lives in me. In Romans Paul calls this the death of the old man, and here it is once again, explained in Thomas Merton’s favourite story.

When Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu were crossing Hao River by the dam, Chuang said: “See how free the fishes leap and dart. That is their happiness.”

As they walked, Hui replied: “Since you are not a fish, how do you KNOW what makes fishes happy?”

Chuang said: “Since you are not I, how can you possibly KNOW that I do not know what makes fishes happy.”

Hui argued: “But if I, not being you, cannot know what you know, it follows that you, not being a fish, cannot know what THEY know.”

Chaung said: “OK, then let us get back to your original question. You asked me, HOW I know what makes fishes happy. From the terms of your question you know already THAT I know what makes fishes happy. The answer is that I know the joy of fishes in the river THROUGH MY OWN JOY, as I go walking along the same river.”

When it feels that you are not separate from others, that you know them through the same river, there is only this unity behind nature, the wisdom mind. As John’s gospel states: ‘In the beginning was the word,’ and this word, ‘word’ comes from a Greek word, ‘Logos’: the Logos which became flesh and dwelt among us.

Because the word Logos is translated into English as ‘word’, but it really means wisdom, the wisdom of God, because it signifies Christ, the word of God, who is not a book, just as a ring is more than a piece of metal, because it signifies a commitment, and a house is more than a pile of bricks, as it signifies a home.

The word Logos was coined by Heraclitus six centuries before Jesus, and it suggests the shared aliveness of eternal reason, a cosmic pattern, an expression of unity behind nature, the mind of the universe, a first principle, a unity hidden from view, which balances out all the opposites.

When the New Testament was translated from Greek to Chinese, the Logos was rendered as DAO. In the beginning was the Dao, it said, and the Dao dwelt among us. Lao Tzu was writing about Dao as Heraclitus was writing about Logos.

Lao Tzu taught a return via the way, to the golden age, when people were closer to heaven and nature, when man was in a pure state, just as our Judeo Christian creation myth teaches an original state of union with God rather than self-sufficient clinging and subsequent fear of separation, in life and death.

Immeasurable indeed were the ancients, said Lao Tzu, subtle, unfathomable and penetrating, in pristeen simplicity, rising above the desire for created things, like an uncarved block, like water, which unresistingly accepts the lowest level yet also manages to wear away the hardest substance.

In the same way, Thomas Merton said what sin is to the Christian, cosmic disorder or personal anxiety is to the Daoist.

A shared joy comes in contemplation, intuition, meditation, a seeing expressed in spiral galaxies above us when we walk on the beach, spiral shells on that same beach which we walk on, spiral fingerprints on our hands holding them, and the spiral dna helix inside the flesh of those same hands.

This joy is a practice, but it was revealed to us from beyond our reach, in the flesh of a Palestinian Jew who said Love your neighbour as Being yourself.

All this talk of union between self and God is a paradox, like the Nicene Creed, which describes Jesus as both fully human and fully divine.

If it seems they can’t both be true at once, they can’t be resolved, then we still need to access the resolution through ourselves, a likeness between the seer and seen, so spirit and matter can coexist, a particular expression of the whole.

Jesus suggested this way of being was closed to those who claimed it. Jesus probably didn’t call himself Christ either, because Christ was not his last name.

It is the Greek translation of Messiah, a Hebrew term for anointed one, someone acknowledged as a leader approved of by God. But in the New Testament, Christ the Logos, the wisdom of God, means much more than a leader:

In John’s Gospel: “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood.”

In Colossians: “In the Son all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

In Ephesians: “With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.”

In the first letter of John: “What was from the beginning, what we have heard what we have seen with our eyes, looked at and touched with our hands concerning the Word of Life, we have seen and testify and proclaim to you as eternal life. That which was with the Father and was manifested to us, we have seen and heard and we proclaim to you so that you too may have fellowship with us.

"Indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. These things we write, so that our joy may be made complete. This is the message we have heard and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.”

So if, as we have just heard, the whole universe existed in Christ, this can’t mean the whole universe existed in the human Jesus who grew up in Nazareth, walked around the fertile regions of Galilee and headed for Jerusalem.

What the whole universe existed in Christ means is that the whole universe existed in the wisdom mind whom Jesus embodied on this earth.

So it was Christ as spirit materialising in a Big Bang 14 billion years ago, it is Christ religions seek today, it will be Christ left when it all expires in a heat death.

Christians believe that when recorded history was ready, the cosmic Christ, the mind of this universe, became incarnate, so that it wasn’t just mathematical wisdom, but so, as love, we could fall in love with it, see it, and touch it, and as a result of its being embodied, intuit it in this world.

The bliss of contemplative Christianity is that pre-existent love, not a concept, not a book, not a system to relieve guilt, but the love which loves you first and loves you more, is in the world.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and you are this beholder, so beauty is really you.

None of this requires the euphemistic justice of a death of Jesus, which was really a miscarriage of justice, and much of atheism is a valid rejection of a sick view of God.

Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest theologians, said that no-one needed to die, it was just an appropriate way of showing what God suffers in redeeming the world. Jesus died saying forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.

What it does require is the birth of Christ, because Christianity is the good tidings into a world saved before creation. It is a blissful birth, not a violent death. A saved world before the creation through a virgin birth which floods the world with liberating gnosis, or self-knowledge, like Edmund’s knowledge on that square rigger under the moonlight, so that each moment is a confrontation with the cosmic heart.

But what is our over analytical and reductionist modern mind to make of this virgin birth? Modern cloning techniques suggest a man’s sperm is not required for a birth to happen anyway, so it really shouldn’t be too problematic. But that’s not the point.

Christ’s virgin birth was more than just unusual, it was actually a political statement. Alexander the Great’s birth had been attributed to a virgin, and the Roman Emperor Augustus’ birth was attributed to a virgin, so acknowledging Christ’s birth as a virgin birth was pledging one’s allegiance to a wholly different leader, not a time bound empire builder with a will to impose and the military means to do it, but someone eternal, someone non violent, someone existing in this world in such a way as to appear other-worldly, like Lao Tzu’s water, accepting the lowest level, but still wearing away the hardest substance.

Nor was this the birth of a non-violent mystery teacher like Buddha, who taught the dissolution of the self as the end of psychological suffering.

What purpose, Buddha had asked, is served in identifying with a fleeting, flickering, flux like body mind, its changing thoughts, its ephemeral sensations and emotions, clinging to I, me, mine.

Socrates had also said, “the unaware life is not worth living”.

And as someone else said more recently: “I would like to look at the mountain for what it is, and not just as a comment on my life.” Jesus would agree with this, in his parables and teachings, and that the Kingdom of God is within, but Jesus is more.

So let’s draw some conclusions.

If Jesus says you are the light of the world, and the first letter of John says that in God there is no darkness, who does that make you?

If Buddha’s birth was the birth of a wisdom teacher, Christ’s birth was the birth of the wisdom itself. St Irenaeus Bishop of Lyons put it well in 202 AD: “In his infinite love God became man, so that man could become God.”

Jesus will return, but possibly not literally, all wet and damp and aquaplaning in at 33 miles per hour through a cloud, maybe a nuclear mushroom cloud somewhere over the Red Sea.

There will be an end of history, but isn’t that always the case when eternity enters time?

Spirit filled poets, seers, visionaries, apocalyptic dreamers and God-inspired prophets all rise from the present moment. Now you are the space in which God is at work. Now time disappears, and a favourite Eastern Orthodox saying is that a person whose mind is full of thoughts is far from Jesus.

In the 2nd century, Ptolemy wrote: “Mortal as I am, I know that I am born for a day, but when I follow the serried multitude of the stars, my feet no longer touch the earth”.

Ptolemy’s earth-centered universe is long gone, now we theorise multi verses, now we know of a thousand million stars in a thousand million galaxies, and time may not end until they have all run their course, with any undiscovered life forms they may hold.

Human life is bewildering, but in a positive sense. If we put one fingernail up against the night sky, behind this tiny little space which our one tiny little fingernail obscures, there are one million galaxies hidden.

Studying the healthiest people he could find, to see what they all had in common, the psychologist Abraham Maslow concluded the most humane people have all had mystic experiences.

These experiences imply a loss of control, rather than a firm grip. And there is a reason for this. What we grasp is knowledge, but what grasps us is wisdom. The wisdom of God. Not the sick God atheism is allergic to, but Love, and not our love, just Love.

An existential ‘yes’ to belonging to wisdom, whether we like to or whether not. We do need an ego to relate to one another, but we don’t need to identify with one. Wisdom can play with the ego in silence, and enter down into the abyss of God. It is not fearful. ‘Fear not’ is the most common Biblical command, and the angels are always saying it.

At night, our eyes are 100,000 times more sensitive to light, and every second, not even as long as it takes to breathe in once, as many blood cells will die and be born in our bodies as London has inhabitants.

Your blood vessels, if lined end to end, would reach around the world, but your heart needs only 60 seconds to pump all your blood through the network and back, because it beats 100,000 times a day, and still you have no control over it.

Nor do you give instructions to the 35 million digestive glands in your stomach to digest even one strawberry. Frankly, you may as well be absent.

Except that as well as absence there is the Logos, a liberating presence, which the New Testament calls the parousia, the making present of Christ.

This cosmic Christ, who can never become the private property of any Church, any person, any company or human society, is more than any of us can imagine. He embraces within His universal body saints and sinners.

All separation from Him shall be removed when the world is absorbed into Him again, inevitably, irresistably.

So to answer our original question, who am I, we are not little waves of material and psychological expressions, but we are the ocean who expresses them, in whom they are expressed, the cosmic Christ, still at large, still elusive, still utterly accessible, and still dangerous to each and every anthropocentric religious system, in this conscious and sacramental universe.

Psalm 39 says everyone’s life is but a breath, so we breathe, and God is breathing in us.

In Christ, we become who we are.

NON DUALITY

with thanks to Fr Richard Rohr


So what is non duality? Non duality means the lived experience of seeing whole, of seeing that you and the universe are one. It is an inner gesture by which we entrust ourselves totally and unconditionally to life, perceived as our own life but also as greater than ourselves.

Non duality is a feeling of belonging to the universe rather than a feeling of alienation from it. In Genesis, this is by eating from the tree of life, holism, and not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, dualism, by splitting up experience and then rejecting of part of it.

As soon as we decide God is here, but not there, religion is dead. As medieval mystic Meister Eckhart said: “God enjoys himself … His own inner enjoyment is such that it includes his enjoyment of all creatures not as creatures, but as God.”

Jesus also expresses non duality. “My Father’s sun shines on the good and the bad; his rain falls on the just and the unjust.” “Let the weeds and the wheat grow together” “If thine eye is single, thy whole body will be filled with light” or “Nor should people say here it is or there it is, because the Kingdom of God is within you,” or “Whoever follows me must die to himself.”

We might well ask how can a person can follow anyone or anything after dying to his or herself, but Jesus is a model for our transformation. Jesus is the first Western religious teacher of the experience of non duality. In non duality, of course, there is no such thing as the West anyway, which is why Socrates said he was a citizen of the world. But at least in the region Jesus lived and died, he was the first religious teacher of non duality, though there were non dual philosophers.

Jesus’ teaching on prayer in Matthew’s gospel is also non dual. It is to pay attention to the limitations of words and ideas, to pass through silence like a merchant who sells every other thing he has, for the one pearl. The disciple is one with life, even in suffering and evil, which is possibly why Jesus taught non-violence.

There isn’t one early church Father who interprets Jesus as advocating anything but strict non-violence, and there are lots of stories of Christians being persecuted because they refused to serve in the Roman army. We are not here to condemn military service, or belittle the sacrifice of soldiers, that would be more duality. But non duality and non violence do go together in Jesus’ teaching, and listening to it from the point of view of the later just war tradition only seems radical, because it goes back to the non dual roots of peace.

“Love your enemies. Pray for those whose persecute you, so you may be children of your Father who makes his sun rise on evil and good.”

“Offer the wicked man no resistance. If you only love those who love you, what good is that?”

“Do not fear those who can kill the body, but only those who can kill the soul.”

And “Why do you call me ‘Lord Lord’ when you don’t do as I say?”

It is hard to live this, but after Constantine adopted Christianity as the religion of the empire in 313 AD, it became almost impossible. Before that soldiers were refused baptism, and after it, only the baptised could be soldiers! It is very hard to see the non-duality of the sermon on the mount through an imperialistic lens. So when the Roman empire legitimised Jesus, St Anthony and the desert fathers and mothers fled into Palestine and Egypt to try to hold onto his teaching.

Anthony also displayed non duality. He said: “One who knows oneself, knows God,” and to this day Orthodox Christianity talks about theosis and deification, the process of our becoming God.

Anthony said this: “Understand that, be it the holy heavens or angels or archangels or thrones or dominions or cherubim or seraphim or sun or moon or stars, or patriarchs or prophets or apostles, or devil or satan or evil spirits or powers of the air, or man or woman, in the beginning of their creation, they all derived from One.”

And echoing St Paul he said this: “The Holy Spirit brings us back to our beginning, to recover our inheritance. There is neither male nor female, there is neither slave nor free.”

And this: “Wherever you go, have God ever before your eyes.”

Anthony’s followers, Abba Doulas and Abba Macarius said this: “One day when we were walking beside the sea I was thirsty and I said to Abba Bessarion, "Father, I am very thirsty." He prayed and said to me, "Drink some of the sea water." The water proved sweet, and I poured some into a leather bottle for fear of being thirsty later on. Seeing this, the old man asked me why I was taking some. I said to him, "Forgive me, it is for fear of being thirsty later on." The old man said, "No need. God is here, God is everywhere." The lesson again is not that sea water is sweet, but that non duality and trusting God means living in the now.

Abba Macarius was once asked, “How should one pray?” The old man said 'There is no need at all to make long discourses; it is enough to stretch out one's hands and say, "Lord, as you will, and as you know."

This type of prayer was systematically taught in the monasteries of Europe, as contemplation. Contemplation literally means doing a higher measure – it is realizing one is not one’s thoughts and sensations, body, our name and possessions, but that they are all in one, and we must not try to possess them but, let them all pass through us. Teresa of Avila said it like this: “Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you, all things are passing, God alone is sufficient,” and John of the Cross emphasised “Nada” or nothingness. For the Contemplative, God is not a thing, a mere object, God contains every thing, every object, every world, and to be possessive of these things is worse than death. St Benedict said to really live you had to face death each and every day.

There were three stages in this monastic teaching of Contemplation: Firstly, disidentifying with one’s obsessive thoughts and compulsive feelings, or Purgation. Most of us were in this stage.

Secondly, seeing your mixed motives and the mixed motives of all the structures you are a part of, or illumination. Some people were in this stage.

And finally, the union of one’s soul with God, or unification – which brings with it life in the One - relationality, vulnerability, intimacy, forgiveness and self acceptance. There is only one at this stage. For the mystic, there is no duality between creator and creation. The whole universe is an expression of this divine life.

But all this was lost with the strong resurgence of dualism at the Reformation. To define your institution, either Protestant or Catholic, and exclude the other from it, you have to prove you are right, and establish opposition. This is classic duality, and it leads church to become about belonging rather than transforming.

Fast forward to the 1950’s and 60’s and enter Thomas Merton, Cistercian monk, who said that the West no longer even understood its own tradition. “You are not contemplatives,” he said, “you are just introverts”. Thomas Merton’s classic book is: “New Seeds of Contemplation,” and his classic statement on the experience of non duality is that: “God is not someone else.” This isn’t bringing God down to our level, but it is living without separation from the infinite, the eternal.

In our own everyday experience, we divide the present into a memory and an imagination, so that we are never here, where eternity is. Thomas Merton said that modern people are always telling themselves the time, as though the time would cease to exist if they stopped talking about it, which in fact, it would.

Jesus said: “My yoke is gentle and my burden is light” – and the word yoke is from the same root as the word yoga – which means one, or unity, or non duality.

So may the breath of life stay with you and may the sacrament of the present moment stay with you, and may the peace of God which passes all understanding fill your heart and mind with the knowledge and love of God, and of his son Jesus Christ our Lord, and the blessing of God almighty, the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit, be with us now and remain upon us always.

Amen +

Accept yourself

There’s a story about a parachutist who bails out of a plane and lands in a tree. He hangs there until he spots a passerby, who says: “How did you get up there?” ‘I fell from the sky’ he replies, ‘but where am I?’ “In a tree.” says the passer by. ‘You must be clergy,’ sighs the parachutist. “How did you know?” the passer by asks. “Because clergy always tell me something completely true but utterly useless.”

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus doesn’t only tell us something true, something which has been around as long as the recession or Cliff Richard, but something which is useful. “Scribes and Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat ... do whatever they teach you, but don’t do as they do!” In other words, do the practice.

There’s another story about the devil going for a walk with a friend when they see a man stoop and pick something up. “What did that man just find?” asked the friend. “A piece of truth,” said the devil. “Doesn't that disturb you?” asked the friend. “No,” said the devil. “I’ll let him make a belief out of it.”

There is nothing wrong with belief, unless the belief is small enough to stop you practicing it. So Jesus’ teaching about prayer in Matthew’s gospel warns against external religion, which feeds ego, reputation, fame, concern for the world’s perceptions. “They do their deeds to be seen by others,” he says, with broad phylacteries, those little tie on boxes with scripture in, with long fringes on their prayer shawls, with places of honour at banquets, the best seats in a synagogue, or for respect in the market place, and the desire to be called a Rabbi.

Jesus is also called Rabbouni, or teacher, more than by any other name in the gospels, but he doesn’t start the Lord’s prayer off with “Our Jesus”. His desire is not to talk about himself, but about the life and teaching he embodies, and which we can embody. Call no one your father on earth, he says, you have one Father in heaven. Nor are we to be called instructors, we have one instructor, one Messiah, one true Self, to whom we can say: “Not my will, but yours, or Thy will be done”

The practice is saying a wholehearted yes, accepting what is, not setting up a rival to God which prevents us from being fully alive, which means to be able to say: “For all that has been, thanks, and for all that shall be, yes.” It is as shocking as it is simple. God’s only rival is anything or anyone who weakens the attitude of yes and thanks, which is a gratefulness that makes us happy.

The prayer practice Jesus recommends is to notice we are a mystery to our temporary selves, and all who exalt themselves will be humbled, all who humble themselves will be exalted. We are not our thoughts, beliefs, sensations, bodies. God is the I am of the disciple, as well as the I am of Moses, but the kingdom of God is so difficult to define, Jesus has to use images and parables, like a man who stumbles across treasure in field by accident, then buries it in his sheer joy so he can go and sell everything else to buy the field which contains it, the field of his boundary-less awareness, and have it joyously contained in an ordinary life.

Anyone who wants to find God must also understand the limitations of words and ideas, must look, listen, hear without preconceived images, ideas, or reactions, read scripture meditatively, pass through silence, like suddenly walking into a fullness of being, a moment of joy and enlightenment, so the disciple’s prayer is to give up everything to acquire who he or she really is, like a merchant who sells everything he has, the disciple becomes poor in spirit, not deficient, but un-possessive, to buy one fine pearl of unconditional happiness, even in suffering and evil. He or she doesn’t try to hold anything else, any experience, person, status, he or she accepts, in a free generous open way, so that he or she is one with life, risen life.

As we give up our time bound definitions of who we are, body, clothes, relatives, possessions, and even our reason, we give up something good for something greater, give our full attention to what contains them all, to what really is. We let go of thoughts and live as the One source of all thoughts, images, sensations and daydreams, the One God. We go to the very earliest intuitions humanity has had about what is behind the senses and the mind.

Coming back to today, we are now seeing the effects of not accepting what is, but insisting we need something else, or as a former Bishop put it, encouraging people to borrow money they can’t afford, to buy things they don’t need, to impress people they don’t like… people are demonstrating against financial mismanagement and government cutbacks across the world, and a vested interest in ensuring that things are loved and people are used, rather than the other way around.

There’s a story about a woman who is given three requests by God, who is weary of her. She asks for her husband to disappear so she can have a better one. But then she remembers his virtues and asks for him to be brought back again. With one request left she can’t decide what to ask for. What good is immortality without health? What good is health without money? What good is money without friends? So she asks God – what is your will - what should I ask for. God says “ask to be content no matter what you receive.”

St Paul says something very similar in his letter to the Philippians. I have learned the secret of being content, he says, in any and every situation. In Christ, he is no longer at the mercy of growth and decay, success and failure, honour and disgrace, poverty and riches, life and death. Thy will be done.

This is Jesus’ prayer – he is saying prayer is about interiority. We don’t need to use lots of words, he says, because our Father knows what we need before we ask. If he knows… he knows. This gives us trust to be still, to pay attention, just as God is paying attention. Just attention. Jesus advises us not to be unduly concerned about anything else - physical needs and consumer madness, but to look to beauty in the world, flowers and birds, to contemplate.

Set our mind on God’s Kingdom, so everything else will follow. Prayer in Matthew’s gospel is about being mindful, receiving the present, and not worrying about tomorrow. It is moving beyond words into a trusting loving intention which is in us, and more than this which actually is us.

Learning to practice is the same as learning to be. Distraction is unhappiness, and the cure is to pay attention. To give yourself to the moment, and to let go of the hundred thousand things contained within it. They are arising and passing within you. You, like God, contain them, so… accept yourself.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit +

Life, in all its fullest

Would you like to hear some children’s prayers?

Dear God, maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other so much if they had their own rooms. It works with my brother.

Dear God, I bet it is hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There are only four people in our family and I can never do it.

Dear God, if you watch in church on Sunday I will show you my new shoes.

Dear God, I found out how babies are made. It doesn’t sound right to me.

Finally, and remember this one, Dear God, instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don’t you just keep the ones you’ve got now?

It is easy to mock the three-tier universe and the other now legendary anachronisms of the Christian tradition as childish, but this last prayer is not childish, because death throws everything we think we know into question. It makes us all children.

So don’t ever let anyone tell you the physical world does not allow for resurrection. Our best physical theories about the cosmos suggest a profound connection between a nothingness from which we originate and an infinity in which we are engulfed.

And when someone dies, they seem to become nothing. But what is no-thing?

Modern physics shows us that nothingness is in fact a seething mass of virtual particles, all appearing and disappearing trillions of times in the blink of an eye.

Using lasers in a vacuum chamber, science shows us that electrons within atoms are wobbled about by a deep and mysterious energy filling every single apparently empty space in the entire universe.

To put it another way, creation is full of God’s essence, as energy, and this is in fact just how the Orthodox Church does put it.

It isn’t just that the study of the physical world at its smallest levels can mathematically and scientifically predict these fluctuations in such a way that they exactly match the measurements in a vacuum chamber, but that a fluctuation within nothing can actually cause a universe full of matter.

And since God is not a thing, the light released after the Big Bang shows us how this nothing seems to have the most incredible potential.

So I repeat, even though it is easy to mock literal interpretations of much of the Bible and Church tradition, don’t let anyone tell you that the physical world does not allow resurrection. On the contrary, tell them how it does, since as far as our physics can tell, the physical world is actually spiritual.

The world allowed resurrection two thousand years ago, and it still does. New life still comes out from despair and destruction, whatever that is, for you. Resurrection, here-and-now, and not only for this life.

As St Paul says, if only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

What do I mean? Well, for example, in her book, On Life After Death, which you can still buy, the pioneer in the field of death and dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, shares a provocative personal experience about her meeting Mrs. Schwarz, a woman she worked with who had died ten months earlier. At the time, she, Elizabeth, was about to give up her work. She was exasperated.

And she says this: “A woman walked straight toward me and said, ‘Dr. Ross, I had to come back. Do you mind if I walk you to your office? It will only take two minutes.’ But this was the longest walk of my life. I am a psychiatrist. I work with schizophrenia. When patients would have hallucinations, I would tell them, ‘I know you see that Madonna on the wall, but I don’t see it.’ So I said to myself, ‘Elisabeth, I know you see this woman, but that can’t be.’

"And all the way to my office I did reality testing on myself, and when we reached my door, she opened it with this incredible kindness and tenderness and love, and said: ‘Dr. Ross, I had to come back, to thank you, and because you cannot stop this work on death and dying, not yet.’ I looked at her, and I don’t know if I thought by then, it could be Mrs. Schwarz. I mean, this woman had been buried for ten months, and I didn’t believe in all that stuff.

"But I finally got to my desk. I touched everything that was real. I touched my pen, my desk, my chair. I was hoping that she would disappear. But she didn’t. Then the scientist in me won, and I said something very shrewd. ‘Reverend Gaines would just love to have a note from you. Would you mind?’ And this woman, knowing every thought I had, and I knew it, took the paper and wrote a note.

"Then she got up, and ready to leave, repeated, ‘Dr. Ross, you promise,’ implying don’t give up the work. So I said, ‘I promise.’ And at that moment, she disappeared.”

Don’t let anyone tell you the physical world does not allow resurrection.

You may not personally have seen it yet, but as the gospel says, blessed are those who have not, and yet have come to believe.

Blessed, because a life lived in the hope, the trust, the intuition, the knowledge, or yes, even the experience, that death is not the end of life, is life lived closer to perfection.

The Bible says that through believing in Jesus you may have life in his name, but what does this actually mean?

It means to believe in the life which he represents.

The life of your true Self, not your ego.

That life which is both before and after you.

Your real life.

Spiritual life.

Matter is in life, not the other way around.

Which is it to be then?

St Paul says if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and those who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.

And what does that ‘in Christ’ really mean?

‘Learn Christ’ says the letter to the Ephesians.

Not ‘learn Christianity.’

The first chapter of Colossians and Ephesians says that the whole universe is in Christ. It doesn’t mean the whole universe was in Jesus, the man who walked Nazareth, but in the cosmic mind principle he embodied, and we can too.

Because as St Paul goes on in 1 Corinthians: The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised 'pneumatikon soma', a spiritual body.

So do not let anyone tell you the physical world does not allow resurrection.

Physical death, whenever and however it happens in a life, as an emotional psychological death, or as full brain death, throws everything we think we know into question.

It makes us all children.

But that’s OK.

The remarkable thing about children is their very deep trust in life. Let this be your trust.

Not a 'Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but I actually prayed for a puppy', but a thank God, thank God for life in all its fullest.

The life which was in Jesus, and which still is.

In the name of Father Son and Holy Spirit, Amen+