Today, Dr. Rev. Jacqui Lewis‘ adapted Easter Message recounts Mary of Magdala. Dr. Lewis reminds us that each of us are also deputized to bring comfort to the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable by speaking truth to power: “You’ve got sermons to preach.”
Check it out below and/or go to the original post at cac.org/daily-meditations/called-by-name/
Called by Name
In her homily at the 2019 CAC Universal Christ conference, Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis reminds us that we are each called by the resurrected Christ who knows us by name:
Christ is everywhere. Christ is in all things. We are all one. When you’re hungry, my stomach growls. When someone chops down a tree, I’m cut. When the oceans are being poisoned, I feel thirsty for something different. This is our calling, because we’ve been ordained, just like Mary, by the One who knows all about us. I’m inviting you to look in the mirror and see yourself. Recognize yourself as deputized by the Living God. Amen.
Reference: Adapted from Jacqui Lewis, “Easter Liturgy: We Shall All Be Changed,” The Universal Christ Conference, Center for Action and Contemplation, March 31, 2019. Unavailable.
Below are excerpts from a recent post from Joan Chittister titled the radical among us which remembers Clare of Assisi, co-builder of the Franciscan movement.
The feast of Saint Clare of Assisi is August 11.
Chief among Francis’ followers was a woman who was a leader in her own right. The young noblewoman Chiara Di Offreduccio, Clare, was an intelligent, educated, and pious person. Her own family castle had been sacked during the social upheavals in Assisi. She was well-bred, well-to-do, and meant for the better things in life. When she heard Francis preach, however, she knew that his call to radical poverty was hers as well.
Clare was the one, in other words, who really proved that what Francis talked about was doable for people in general, even pampered upper-class ones.
In the end, Francis and Clare brought five things to the world that shocked all of Europe into a new consciousness and that call to us yet today. They brought a call to peace; a consciousness of the poor; a sign that it is possible to be happy without things; a radical reading of the Gospel of Christ that depoliticizes the meaning of conversion; and a new sense of the feminine.
Perhaps poverty is not the sign of the inept. Perhaps poverty is not a mark of lack of character. Perhaps poverty is a sinful residue of a sinful system that blames the victim for its victimage. Perhaps poverty is something about which we all have a responsibility.
The legacy of two intrepidly simple people who would not accept life as it was because it could be so much better is as much a gift to the twenty first century as it was to the thirteenth. ––from A Passion for Life: Fragments of the Face of God, by Joan Chittister
Today, July 22, is the Feast of Mary Magdalene – true friend and loyal leader
Mary Magdalene: Apostle
A Woman Whom Scripture Calls by Name
“If I were pressed to say why I love him,” Montaigne wrote of his deceased friend Etienne de Boetie, “I feel my only reply could be, ‘Because it was he, because it was I.’” Friendship, real friendship, in other words, is the blurring of two souls into one where it was thought two had been. No price exacted. No interest paid.
Friendship is the linking of stories. It is a spiritual act, not a social one. It is the finding of the remainder of the self. It is knowing a person before you even meet them. I am not so sure, then, that we so much find a friend as it is that friendship, the deathless search of the soul for itself, finds us. Then the memory of Mary Magdalene becomes clear, becomes the bellwether of the real relationship.
Mary Magdalene is the woman whom Scripture calls by name in a time when women were seldom named in public documents at all. She is, in fact, named fourteen times—more than any other woman in the New Testament except Mary of Nazareth, the mother of Jesus, herself. She is clearly a very important, and apparently a very wealthy woman. Most of all, she understood who Jesus was long before anyone else did and she supported him in his wild, free ranging, revolutionary approach to life and state and synagogue. She was, it seems, the leader of a group of women who “supported Jesus out of their own resources.” And she never left his side for the rest of his life.
She was there at the beginning of the ministry. And she was there at the end. She was there when they were following him in cheering throngs. And she was there when they were taking his entire life, dashing it against the stone of synagogue and state, turning on him, jeering at him, shouting for his death, standing by while soldiers poked and prodded him to ignominy. She tended his grave and shouted his dying glory and clung to his soul. She knew him and she did not flinch from the knowing.
The Magdalene factor in friendship is the ability to know everything there is to know about a person, to celebrate their fortunes, to weather their straits, to chance their enemies, to accompany them in their pain and to be faithful to the end, whatever its glory, whatever its grief. The Magdalene factor is intimacy, that unshakeable immersion in the life of the other to the peak of ecstasy, to the depths of hell.
—from The Friendship of Women by Joan Chittister (BlueBridge)
The Center for Action and Contemplation provides another message of diversity and inclusion. Check out the excerpts from their message below and the two contributing authors as well.
The Spirit Is for All
Thursday, May 23, 2024 at cac.org/daily-meditations/the-spirit-is-for-all/
Author Lisa Sharon Harper describes the diversity of the early church:
At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit rushed in and caused all those present to speak in languages that were not their own. Each person understood the others…. God established the confusion between languages at the Tower of Babel (see Genesis 11). At Pentecost, God brought the languages together, but not in the way we would imagine. God did not unite the world under one imperial language. Rather, the power of God made it possible to have unity in the midst of diversity. God made it possible for people to speak languages that were not their own and to understand one another.
In other words, all the cultural, economic, and gender barriers between them were broken down. [1]
Theologian Luke Powery names how the Holy Spirit’s presence is given for all, not just some:
No human voice or body is denied the presence and fire of God. Humans, regardless of ethnicity or race, speak a multiplicity of languages to reveal the diversity of God from the beginning, which is the vision of the end….
Pentecost… creates a new world. It is a new creation ignited by the Spirit. The Spirit may be “unsought” or “unwanted” but is “intent on making all things new.” [3] This includes new flesh, a new body for the people of God. [4]
References: [1] Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right (New York: Waterbrook, 2016), 183–184.
[2] Zora Neale Hurston, The Sanctified Church (Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island, 1981), 91.
[3] Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, The Holy Spirit (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2015), 35.
[4] Luke A. Powery, Becoming Human: The Holy Spirit and the Rhetoric of Race (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2022), 70–71, 73, 75.
Richard Rohr provides another provocative post about the examples provided by Saints Francis and Claire of Assisi.
One quote from the article link below that grabs my attention is:
“When we agree to live simply, we put ourselves outside of others’ ability to buy us off, reward us falsely, or control us by money, status, punishment, and loss or gain. This is the most radical level of freedom, but, of course, it’s not easy to come by. Francis and Clare created a life in which they had little to lose, no desire for gain, no debts to pay, and no luxuries they needed or wanted. Most of us can only envy them.“
I am the luckiest man in the universe and this week I walked three new dogs and one lovable repeater. Pictured below are Elmers, Manifest, Fury (all new to me) and The Supreme (a personal BFFF).
What keeps us from seeking our soul’s deepest desire? Most often it is the ego and its fear of annihilation.
Few of us have the courage to pray as St. Francis did — “Who are you, O God? And who am I?”—because we don’t really want to know the answer. While our souls long for intimate unions with God, unions in which we can no longer distinguish our deepest selves from the Divine, our ego selves understand the price of these unions: the loss of our hard-fought external identities.
We’ve spent our entire lives crafting an identity to present to the world, and our egos are terrified at the prospect of that identity being consumed in the flame of God’s great love. For if we follow our soul’s desire, we will be left standing defenseless and out of control, which is precisely where we need to be to experience the sheer delight and the richness of God’s consuming love for us.
The Good News for our souls is that the fire of God’s love is relentless and will eventually break through our well-formed heat shields. When that happens, we too will become a fire of consuming love that draws in everyone around us.
Loving and irresistible God, you draw me into your flame of love, and yet I resist. I pray for the courage to surrender my whole self to you, as St. Francis did, so that, like Francis, I might experience the joy of a life without control, a life that brings the unexpected delights of sweet surrender.
Loving God, help me to stop counting the costs and to overcome my fear of loss, so that through your consuming love I may find my true self, transformed by love, ready to share that experience of pure joy through loving service to the world around me.
“Silver-screen and singing legend Doris Day recorded more than 650 songs and starred in nearly 40 films, but PETA will always remember her for her most important role: animal champion. … Day personally rescued, fostered, and found loving homes for hundreds of animals, earning her the affectionate nickname “The Dog Catcher of Beverly Hills.”
Recognizing the need to stop animal homelessness at its source, she founded the Doris Day Pet Foundation in 1978, which later became the Doris Day Animal Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has saved countless animals’ lives by providing grants for spaying and neutering as well as funding humane education in schools and helping senior citizens pay for their animal companions’ food and veterinary care.
In 1987, she formed the Doris Day Animal League (DDAL) to lobby for humane legislation…. In recognition of her work for animals, former President George W. Bush honored Day with the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.”
“Simply pray for what’s best, realizing that you may not know what that is.”
Below is a repost from a thoughtful Tricycle archive article. Regardless of your personal faith tradition, I hope this article offers you some provocative thoughts on what prayer means to you.
Why do we pray? We might think that if we do, the Buddha, or God, or a deity will look kindly upon us, bestow blessings, protect us. We might believe that if we don’t, the deity won’t like us, might even punish us. But the purpose of prayer is not to win the approval or avert the wrath of an exterior God.
To the extent that we understand Buddha, God, the deity, to be an expression of ultimate reality, to that extent we receive blessings when we pray. To the extent that we have faith in the boundless qualities of the deity’s love and compassion, to that extent we receive the blessings of those qualities.
Sometimes we project human characteristics onto things that aren’t human. For example, if we sentimentally think, “My dog is meditating with me,” we’re only attributing that behavior to the dog; we’re imagining what it’s doing. When we anthropomorphize God, we project our own faults and limitations, imagining they’re God’s as well. This is why many people believe that God either likes or dislikes them depending on their behavior. “I won’t be able to have this or that because God doesn’t like me—I forgot to pray.” Or worse, “If God doesn’t like me, I’ll end up in hell.”
If God feels happy or sad because we do or do not offer prayer, then God is not flawless, not an embodiment of perfect compassion and love. Any manifestation of the absolute truth, by its very nature, has neither attachment to our prayers nor aversion to our lack of them. Such attributes are projections of our own mind.
To understand how prayer works, consider the sun, which shines everywhere without hesitation or hindrance. Like God or Buddha, it continuously radiates all its power, warmth, and light without differentiation. When the earth turns, it appears to us that the sun no longer shines. But that has nothing to do with the sun; it’s due to our own position on the shadow side of the earth. If we inhabit a deep, dark mine shaft, it’s not the sun’s fault that we feel cold. Or if we live on the earth’s surface but keep our eyes closed, it’s not the sun’s fault that we don’t see light. The sun’s blessings are all-pervasive, whether we are open to them or not. Through prayer, we come out of the mine shaft, open our eyes, become receptive to enlightened presence, the omnipotent love and compassion that exist for all beings.
Even if we aren’t familiar with the idea of praying to a deity, most of us feel the presence of some higher principle or truth—some source of wisdom, compassion, and power with the ability to benefit. Praying to that higher principle will without doubt be fruitful.
However, it is very important not to be small-minded in prayer. You might want to pray for a new car, but how do you know if a new car is what you need? It’s better to simply pray for what’s best, realizing that you may not know what that is. A few years ago, a Tibetan woman traveled overseas by airplane. When the plane made a brief stop en route, she got out to walk around. Unfamiliar with the airport, with the language, and with foreign travel, she didn’t hear the announcement of her departing flight and missed it. This probably seemed disastrous at the time, but not long after takeoff the plane that she missed crashed, killing most of the passengers.
We pray for what’s best not only for ourselves, but for all beings. When we’re just starting practice, our self-importance is often so strong that our prayers remain very selfish and only reinforce rather than transform self-centeredness. So until our motivation becomes more pure-hearted, it may be beneficial to spend more time cultivating lovingkindness than praying.
With proper motivation, prayer becomes an important component of our practice because it helps to remove obstacles—counterproductive circumstances, imbalances of the subtle energies in the body, confusion and ignorance in the mind. Even in listening to the teachings, we may mentally edit what we hear, adding more to them than is being said or ignoring certain aspects. Prayer offsets these hindrances.
The mind is like a mirror. Although our true nature is the deity, what we now experience are ordinary mind’s reflections. Enemies, hindrances, inauspicious moments—all of which appear to be outside of us—are actually reflections of our own negativities. If you’ve never seen your image before, looking in a mirror you’d think you were gazing through a window, encountering someone altogether independent of you. It wouldn’t seem to have any connection to you as you passed by. If you saw there a horrible-looking person with a dirty face and wild hair, you might feel aversion. You might even try to clean up the image by washing the mirror. But a mirror, like the mind, is reflective—it only shows you yourself. Only if you combed your hair and washed your face could you change what you saw. You’d have to change yourself; you couldn’t change the mirror. Prayer helps to purify the habits of ordinary, small mind and ignorance of our true nature as the deity.
When we pray in the context of deity practice, we sometimes visualize the deity standing or sitting before us in space as an embodiment of perfection, whereas we ourselves have many faults and obscurations. But praying to the deity is not a matter of supplicating something separate from ourselves. The point of using a dualistic method, visualizing the deity outside of us, is to eliminate duality.
When we visualize ourselves as the deity, we deepen our experience of our own intrinsic purity. Finally, in the completion stage of practice, when the form of the deity falls away, we let the mind rest, without effort or contrivance, in its own nature, the ultimate deity.
Thus we begin with an initial conception of purity as external, only to internalize it and ultimately to transcend concepts of inner and outer. This awareness of the nature of the deity increases the power, blessings, and benefit of our prayer.
If the nature of the deity is emptiness, you might wonder why we pray at all. There seems to be a contradiction here. How can we say, on the one hand, that there isn’t a deity, only the reflection of our own intrinsic nature, and, on the other, that we should pray to it? This makes sense only if we understand the inseparability of absolute and relative truth.
On the absolute level, our nature is buddha, we are the deity. But unaware of this, we’re bound by relative truth. In order to make the leap to the realization of our absolute nature, we have to walk on our relative feet, on a relative path. Because absolute truth is so elusive to our ordinary, linear mind, we rely on an increasingly subtle, step-by-step process to work with the mind’s duality until we achieve recognition. Prayer is an essential part of that process.
Red Tara Dedication Prayer
Red Tara is one of Chagdud Tulku’s root practices, which he and his Sangha use daily.
Throughout my many lives and until this moment, whatever virtue I have accomplished, including the merit generated by this practice, and all that I, will ever attain, this I offer for the welfare of sentient beings.
May sickness, war, famine, and suffering be decreased for every being, while their wisdom and compassion increase in this and every future life.
May I clearly perceive all experiences to be as insubstantial as the dream fabric of the night and instantly awaken to perceive the pure wisdom display in the arising of every phenomenon.
May I quickly attain enlightenment in order to work ceaselessly for the liberation of all sentient beings.
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche (1930–2002) was a highly revered meditation master, artist, Tibetan physician and the spiritual director of the Chagdud Gonpa Foundation.
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