God wants useable instruments who will carry the mystery, the weight of glory and the burden of sin simultaneously, who can bear the darkness and the light, who can hold the paradox of incarnation—flesh and spirit, human and divine, joy and suffering, at the same time, just as Jesus did. Watch what Jesus does and do the same thing! That, indeed, is hard… This is the only goodness that is available to humans, but it is more than enough. As Jesus himself will later say, “God alone is good” (Mark 10:18). Such a text gives us both glorious and non-inflating goals. There is no appeal to the ego here, only to our need and desire for union—with our own selves and with God.
The genius of the biblical revelation is that it doesn’t just give us the conclusions; it gives us both the process of getting there and the inner and outer authority to trust that process. Life itself—and Scripture too—is always three steps forward and two steps backward. It gets the point and then loses it or doubts it. In that, the biblical text mirrors our own human consciousness and journey. Our job is to see where the three-steps-forward texts are heading (invariably toward mercy, forgiveness, inclusion, nonviolence, and trust), which gives us the ability to clearly recognize and understand the two-steps-backward texts (which are usually about vengeance, divine pettiness, law over grace, form over substance, and technique over relationship). This is what we cannot discern if we have no inner experience of how God works in our own lives!
God is not afraid of mistakes, it seems. God knows that God can turn everything around—into good. There are no dead ends in the economy of grace. So, God allows us to play the field and eat of almost all the trees in the garden. This is scary, but Paul, as usual, offers a crescendo statement of the same: “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1). Jesus lives it in his climactic forgiving breath (John 20:22), wherein he eternally frees humanity from its shame and guilt. Consider it this way: God’s main problem is how to give away God! But God has great difficulty doing this. You’d think everybody would want God, but the common response is something like this: “Lord, I am not worthy. I would rather have religion and morality, which give me the impression that I can win a cosmic contest by my own efforts.”
Scripture tells us, “God sewed together clothes for them out of the skins of animals and they put them on” (3:21). Surely this is a promise from a protective and nurturing God who takes away their shame and self-loathing. That will become the momentum-building story of the whole Bible, which gradually undoes the common history of a fearsome and threatening deity. God takes away the shame we have by giving us back to ourselves—by giving us God! It doesn’t get any better than that. Human love does the same thing. When someone else loves us, they give us not just themselves, but, for some reason, they give us back our own self, but now a truer and better self.
The more we try to rely upon external threats, the less we are in touch with our own internal power. They tend to cancel one another out. Conversely, the more we are in touch with our own inner power, the less need we have for any external force, threat, or pressure. I would almost describe spirituality as a concern for our being, our inner motivation and attitude, our real inner Source, as opposed to any primary concern for our doing.Doing will always take care of itself when our being is right. It is our preoccupation with external forms and successes that makes us superficial, judgmental, split off, and often just downright wrong—without knowing it.
Only when inner and outer authority come together do we have true spiritual wisdom. We have for too long insisted on outer authority alone, without any teaching of prayer, inner journey, and maturing consciousness. The results for the world and for religion have been disastrous. I am increasingly convinced that the word prayer, which has become a functional and pious thing for believers to do, is, in fact, a descriptor for inner experience. That is why all spiritual teachers mandate prayer so much. They are saying, “Go inside and know for yourself!” We will understand prayer and inner experience this way throughout this book. As Jesus graphically puts it, prayer is “going to your private room and shutting the door and [acting] in secret” (Matthew 6:6). Once you hear it this way, it becomes pretty obvious.
One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life. That’s opposed to God holding out for the pure, the spiritual, the right idea or the ideal anything. This is why Jesus turns religion on its head! That is why I say it is our experiences that transform us if we are willing to experience our experiences all the way through. But it is also why we have to go through these seemingly laborious and boring books of Kings, Chronicles, Leviticus, Numbers, and Revelation. Those books, documenting the life of real communities, of concrete, ordinary people, are telling us that “God comes to us disguised as our life” (a wonderful line I learned from my dear friend and colleague, Paula D’Arcy).
Humans do not have the patience or the humility of God. We want things done as fast as possible to achieve our immediate goals. Spiritual power, however, is the ability to influence events and others through our very being. Evolved people change others interiorly through who they are, and through their sharing of wisdom, rather than through mere external pressure. It is a slower process, but much more long-lasting.
What is the law really for? It’s not to make God love us. That issue is already solved, once and forever, and we are powerless to change it in one direction or the other. The purpose of spiritual law is simply to sharpen our awareness about who we are and who God is, so that we can name our own insufficiency and, in that same movement, find God’s fullness. That’s why saints like Francis are invariably saying, in effect, “I’m nothing. Everything I’ve done that’s good has come from God. The only things I can claim are my own sins.” He is not being overly humble, just truthful. In such people, the law has achieved its full purpose.
The first day of my pilgrimage to Assisi was dawning and I wanted to get the lay of the land and reorient my spiritual GPS after three hectic days of sightseeing in Rome. No one stirred, not even a stray cat or dog in search of bounty from a trash can, as I passed the majestic Basilica di San Francesco, the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, the abbey of San Pietro, and the Basilica di Santa Chiara. Too early even for morning mass, I walked the cobblestones and heard sounds of a new day dawning. As I gazed at the verdant Umbrian countryside in the distance, my imagination went back to a simpler time. I visualized the hilltop village eight centuries ago, without lights or power, phones or internet, insular and isolated, a place where most of its citizens lived and died without traveling more than day’s walk from their Umbrian birthplace. In the still, crisp morning, I experienced the simplicity of a time before climate change, global travel, the novel coronavirus, and the 24/7 news cycle. For a split second, I forgot the machinations of political leaders and the spirit of unrest that has enveloped the globe as I pondered the journey of another pilgrim like myself, trying to make sense of his own inner stirrings and the challenges of his own time and place and looking for a way of life that would nurture his spirit and serve the world. I was looking for a world-affirming way to become a mystic activist for our time.
