“The ads for “The Sterile Cuckoo” remind us that you can fall in love for the first time only once in your life. True enough, but that begs the question of whether Pookie and Jerry are really in love. I doubt it. Their relationship is based more on need: her need to be loved, and his need to make love.” Thus begins the critical movie review by Roger Ebert, the late Pulitzer-Prize winning movie critic who died in 2013. See the full review here: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-sterile-cuckoo-1969
I was a movie reviewer for both my high school and college newspapers. I still enjoy watching movies, especially classics, but stopped writing movie reviews long ago. I was more of a promoter than a critic and definitely not as talented a writer as Roger Ebert. Alas.
Liza Minnelli and the song, Come Saturday Morning, were nominated for Oscars, although neither won. Alas.
“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.
Last week during a 5-day meditation retreat that I and 300 others attended, a special small group consultation session was offered to “anyone who has experienced trauma OR knows someone who has experienced trauma.” Duh! Crowd murmuring began immediately with the gist being: wouldn’t that include everyone here, if not everyone on the planet.
While first or second-hand trauma seem part of our times, does that mean we should “wallow in misery”?
A Healthline article, How to Identify and Deal with a Victim Mentality, written by Crystal Raypole (see http://www.healthline.com/health/victim-mentality), offers a lot of information on this malady. Here are a couple of highlights:
“The victim mentality rests on three key beliefs: Bad things happen and will keep happening. Other people or circumstances are to blame. Any efforts to create change will fail, so there’s no point in trying.
People identify with the victim role when they “veer into the belief that everyone else caused their misery and nothing they do will ever make a difference.”
A victim mentality can be distressing and create challenges, both for those living with it and the people in their lives. But it can be overcome with the help of a therapist, as well as plenty of compassion and self-kindness.”
Here’s another Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation repost (from https://cac.org/daily-meditations/). It’s a beautiful reminder, similar to a message from the Bhagavad Gita, that divine DNA is in all of us and that love and life are messy.
Purity Is Not Holiness
Pastor and public theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber describes how emphasizing “purity” leads us away from holiness:
Our purity systems, even those established with the best of intentions, do not make us holy. They only create insiders and outsiders. They are mechanisms for delivering our drug of choice: self-righteousness, as juice from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil runs down our chins. And these purity systems affect far more than our relationship to sex and booze: they show up in political ideology, in the way people shame each other on social media, in the way we obsess about “eating clean.” Purity most often leads to pride or to despair, not holiness. Because holiness is about union with, and purity is about separation from….
To connect to the holy is to access the deepest, juiciest part of our spirits. Perhaps this is why we set up so many boundaries, protections, and rules around both sex and religion…. But when the boundaries, protections, and rules become more important than the sacred thing they are intended to protect, casualties ensue.
But no matter how much we strive for purity in our minds, bodies, spirits, or ideologies, purity is not the same as holiness. It’s just easier to define what is pure than what is holy, so we pretend they are interchangeable.
Bolz-Weber points to Jesus’ actions to encourage seeking holiness over purity:
Jesus seemed to want connection with those around him, not separation. He touched human bodies deemed unclean as if they were themselves holy: dead little girls, lepers, menstruating women. People of his day were disgusted that Jesus’ disciples would eat with unwashed hands, and they tried to shame him for it. But he responded, “It is not what enters the mouth that makes one unclean but what comes out of it that defiles” [Matthew 15:11]. He was loyal to the law, just not at the expense of the people.
Jesus kept violating boundaries of decency to get to the people on the other side of that boundary, those who’d been wounded by it, those who were separated from the others: the motherless, the sex workers, the victims, and the victimizers. He cared about real holiness, the connection of things human and divine, the unity of sinners, the coming together of that which was formerly set apart.
When I think of holiness, the kind that is sensual and embodied and free from shame and deeply present in the moment and comes from union with God, I think of a particular scene in the Gospels when, right in the middle of a dinner party, a woman cracks open a jar of myrrh and pours it over Jesus’ feet [Luke 7:37–38]. She then takes her unbound hair and wipes his feet, mixing her mane, her tears, and her offering on the feet of God. Her separateness, from herself and her God, is alleviated in that moment. Holiness braided the strands of her being into their original and divine integrated configuration.
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Shameless: A Sexual Reformation (New York: Convergent Books, 2019), 26, 22, 26–27.
Fr. Richard Rohr, and his staff, remind us that “Now, in the last season of my life, I realize that what’s in front of me is still largely darkness—but it doesn’t matter anymore.”
God asks only that you get out of God’s way and let God be God in you. —Meister Eckhart, sermon on 1 John 4:9
Father Richard describes the spiritual discipline of detachment as the practice of “letting go”:
In the larger-than-life people I have met, I always find one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died—and thus they are larger than death, too! Please think about that. At some point, they were led to the edge of their private resources, and that breakdown, which surely felt like dying, led them into a larger life. They went through a death of their various false selves and came out on the other side knowing that death could no longer hurt them. They fell into the Big Love and the Big Freedom—which many call God.
Throughout most of history, the journey through death into life was taught in sacred space and ritual form, which clarified, distilled, and shortened the process. Today, many people don’t learn how to move past their fear of diminishment, even when it stares them down or gently invites them. This lack of preparation for the “pass over,” the absence of training in grief work and letting go, and our failure to entrust ourselves to a bigger life, have contributed to our culture’s spiritual crisis.
All great spirituality is about letting go. Instead, we have made it to be about taking in, attaining, performing, winning, and succeeding. True spirituality echoes the paradox of life itself. It trains us in both detachment and attachment: detachment from the passing so we can attach to the substantial. But if we do not acquire good training in detachment, we may attach to the wrong things, especially our own self-image and its desire for security. [1]
Each time I learn to let go of what I thought was necessary for my own happiness, I invariably find myself in a larger place, a larger space, a deeper union, a greater joy. I’m sorry I can’t prove that to you ahead of time. We only know it after the fact. I used to read every book I could as a young man thinking if I understood good theology, good philosophy, good psychology, I’d know how to live the so-called perfect life and it would show me how to open the door in front of me. Now, in the last season of my life, I realize that what’s in front of me is still largely darkness—but it doesn’t matter anymore. That’s because letting go has taught me that I can look back, not forward, back at the past of my life and I can truthfully say, “What have I ever lost by dying? What have I ever lost by losing?” I have fallen upward again and again. By falling I have found. By letting go I have discovered, and I find myself in these later years of my life still surprised that that is true. [2]
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 199.
[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of Saint Francis (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2010).
Animals are God’s creatures, not human property, nor utilities, nor resources, nor commodities, but precious beings in God’s sight. … Christians whose eyes are fixed on the awfulness of crucifixion are in a special position to understand the awfulness of innocent suffering. The Cross of Christ is God’s absolute identification with the weak, the powerless, and the vulnerable, but most of all with unprotected, undefended, innocent suffering.
Judy Cannato was an American Catholic author, retreat facilitator, and spiritual director. She died from a rare form of cancer in 2011, at the age of 62. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judy_Cannato.
Fortunately, before her death, she gave us these encouraging words:
“[Jesus] engaged death with every bit of consciousness and freedom that were his, and what we all discovered as a result is that death—while inevitable, while altering our dreams and causing us to let go of everything—does not have the final word. There is always—always—resurrection. And what is resurrection for us, in the context of the new universe story? It is a transformation in consciousness, an experience of transcendence in which we live out of the connectedness that is our truth. As we continue to evolve in consciousness, continue to emerge as more and more capable lovers, we share in the resurrection of Christ. We not only walk in the Light, we become light for others. Even little resurrections that come after choosing to die to fear and egocentricity release the Spirit. When we engage in a lifetime of death and resurrections as Jesus did, we become ever more empowered to do the work God asks us to do.
Life and death are a single mystery. That is what the Paschal Mystery teaches us. Death is inevitable—but so is resurrection. We can be sure that dyings will intrude upon our lives, and we may have some choice about how we can respond to their coming. We can be awake and watchful for the resurrections as well, for the creative ways that new life streams into our lives even in the midst of death. Like supernova explosions that shatter every recognizable fragment of life [and scatter elements for new stars], we are capable of transcendence, capable of never allowing death to have the final say.”
Judy Cannato, Radical Amazement: Contemplative Lessons from Black Holes, Supernovas, and Other Wonders of the Universe (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2006), 122.
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Judy’s words remind me of the often-quoted wedding ceremony quote: “Now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” 1 Corinthians 13:13.
What is the difference between the three? “Faith is grounded in the reality of the past; hope is looking to the reality of the future” and love is understanding and acting in the present moment. https://www.gotquestions.org/difference-faith-hope.html
“The true division of humanity,” Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables, “is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness.” Victor Hugo, it seems, understood Easter.
We love to think of Easter as the feast of dazzling light. We get up on Easter Sunday morning knowing that the sorrow of Good Friday is finally ended, that the pain of the cross has been compensated for by a burst of brilliant victory from the gates of the grave, that Jesus is vindicated, that the faith of the disciples is confirmed for all to see, and that everyone lived happily ever after. We love fairy tales. Unfortunately, Easter is not one of them.
On the contrary, Easter is raw reality. Easter stands in stark witness, not to the meaning of death, but to the meaning of what it is to go on despite death, in the face of death—because of death. To celebrate Easter means to stand in the light of the empty tomb and decide what to do next. Until we come to realize that, we stand to misread the meaning not simply of the Easter gospel but of our own lives. We miss the point. We make Easter an historical event rather than a life-changing commitment. We fail to realize that Easter demands as much of us now as it did of the apostles then.
Most of all we miss the very meaning of the Easters that we are dealing with in our own lives, in our own time.
Easter is the feast that gives meaning to life. It is the feast that never ends. After Easter, the tomb stands open for all of us to enter. If Jesus is risen, then you and I have no choice but to go into the tomb, put on the leftover garments ourselves, and follow Jesus back to Galilee where the poor cry for food and the sick beg to be taken to the pool and the blind wait for the spittle on their eyes to dry. All the fidelity in the world will not substitute for leaving the tomb and beginning the journey all over again. Today. Every day. Always.
That’s what Easter is really about. It is the “division of humanity” to which Hugo refers in his dramatic rendering of the struggle between light and dark. Yes, Easter is about dazzling light—but only if it shines through us.
—In the Light of the Messengers: Lenten reflectionsby Joan Chittister,OSB
As Richard Rohr explains below, “Understanding the Universal or Cosmic Christ can change the way we relate to creation, to other religions, to other people, to ourselves, and to God.”
May we all enjoy the healing presence of thisEaster.
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation
Week Fifteen: The Resurrected Christ
Christ Is Risen
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
As we celebrate Easter, the Daily Meditations explore Father Richard’s teachings on the Universal Christ, which reconnect Christ to his cosmic origin.
Understanding the Universal or Cosmic Christ can change the way we relate to creation, to other religions, to other people, to ourselves, and to God. Knowing and experiencing this Christ can bring about a major shift in consciousness. Like Saul’s experience on the road to Damascus (see Acts 9), we won’t be the same after encountering the Risen Christ.
Many people don’t realize that the apostle Paul never met the historical Jesus and hardly ever quotes Jesus directly. In almost all of Paul’s preaching and writing, he refers to the Eternal Christ Mystery or the Risen Christ rather than Jesus of Nazareth before his death and resurrection. The Risen Christ is the only Jesus that Paul ever knew! This makes Paul a fitting mediator for the rest of us, since the Omnipresent Risen Christ is the only Jesus we will ever know as well (see 2 Corinthians 5:16–17).
Jesus’ historical transformation (“resurrected flesh”) and our understanding of the Spirit he gives us (see John 16:7–15; Acts 1:8) allow us to more easily experience the Presence that has always been available since the beginning of time, a Presence unlimited by space or time, the promise and guarantee of our own transformation (see 1 Corinthians 15; 2 Corinthians 1:21–22; Ephesians 1:13–14).
In the historical Jesus, this eternal omnipresence had a precise, concrete,andpersonal referent. God’s presence became more obvious and believable in the world. The formless took on form in someone we could “hear, see, and touch” (1 John 1:1), making God easier to love.
But it seems we so fell in love with this personal interface in Jesus that we forgot about the Eternal Christ, the Body of God, which is all of creation, which is really the First Incarnation. Jesus and Christ are not exactly the same. In the early Christian era, a few Eastern Fathers (such as Origen of Alexandria and Maximus the Confessor) noticed that the Christ was clearly older, larger, and different than Jesus himself. They mystically saw that Jesus is the union of human and divine in space and time; and Christ is the eternal union of matter and Spirit from the beginning of time.
Jesus willingly died—and Christ arose—yes, still Jesus, but now including and revealing everything else in its full purpose and glory. (Read Colossians 1:15–20, so you know this is not just my idea.)
When we believe in Jesus Christ, we’re believing in something much bigger than the historical incarnation that we call Jesus. Jesus is the visible map. The entire sweep of the meaning of the Anointed One, the Christ, includes us and all of creation since the beginning of time (see Romans 1:20).
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Cosmic Christ (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2009). Available as CD and MP3 download.
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