SYNCRONICITY WITH GOD

I agree with St. Thomas Aquinas that the human mind cannot know who God is with human concepts. Divinity and Humanity are separated not only by concepts but also by the tools needed for humans to process and make sense of what they receive. “Quidquid recepitur ad modum recipientis recepitur” is what I remember, “Whatever is received is received according to the disposition of the one who receives it.” In the case of each human, what we assimilate into our persona as we live out our destiny in this world is conditioned by the compendium of our choices and their consequences. The archetypal question at the heart of Genesis is, “What is good and evil, and who is absolute truth beyond the effects of original sin?”

Because I am the only me there is, and you are the only you there is, what we take as meaning and purpose will be different. This apparent dissonance between how each one of us approaches the blindly contradictory concept of a God we cannot see nor can ever possibly comprehend with our human languages, measurements, and concepts only makes sense when I abandon human communication and listen as God taught us. Communication with God is solved by God taking pity on us and sending His only Son to give us the language where we can relate to the unknown, the invisible, and the incomprehensible challenge to all this humanity. Jesus makes sense because he is not only God but also human. Jesus makes sense because He became one of us to be our Magister Noster (Our Master) to lead us out of the wilderness of the human languages we assimilate during our time on earth into a place where, despite our dying after seventy or eighty years, we can continue to move toward our destiny, the next step in our human evolution, being adopted by the Father, to continue our movement to complexity beyond the corruption of mind and matter. Jesus makes sense because the Resurrection from the Dead gives us access to the spiritual universe at Baptism. Life becomes one of learning the various languages that allow us to claim that heritage and assimilate them into the choices we have already made.

I am not you; you are not me; God is not us; and we, most certainly, are not God. Spirituality for me, as a Lay Cistercian seeker, is to learn a bit more about the three questions each human must face with the totality of what they assimilated in their life as meaningful and moving a bit closer to their destiny. Here are three cosmic questions the human heart seeks to reestablish resonance in a world that is permeated by dissonance.

1. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE FULLY HUMAN AS NATURE INTENDED? Not all roads lead to Rome, the saying goes, nor do they lead to what is good or bad for us. What we choose to be is not a single moment as much as it is a movement from simplicity to complexity. If, at the end of my life, I am wealthy, healthy, and wise but miss the purpose of life, I committed the greatest sin, I missed the mark that my nature intended. And who tells me what my nature intended? The Intelligence created your nature and left its DNA on each atom, molecule, and hair of your head. I think each of us collects good and evil as our choices in life. Good moves us deeper into reality, whereas bad limits my ability to choose the right path for my nature with some change of direction. God gives us human direction through signs, wonders, and prophets in the Old Testament, but the Word made Flesh as Jesus, to show us the way, what is true in all the chaos, and lead a life of fulfillment as an adopted son (daughter) of the Father. All we have to do is be in tune with the language of the love of others as Christ loved us.
2. HOW CAN I LOVE FIERCELY AND REACH THE FULFILLMENT OF MY HUMANITY? The meaning of love is the more profound yet resonant theme of all humanity. There is something in each of us that secretly strives to love and to be loved. Because we look at reality differently and have a notion of love, there is a Tower of Babel approach to its meaning. What is the meaning of love beyond just an individual’s opinion? There is good love and bad love (that which destroys and corrupts our humanity). How can humans rise above the rationalism of the individual? Freedom to choose means I, as an individual, have the opportunity to hold whatever I want as the meaning of love. It also means I am a hostage to my own desires, which can change daily, as does my mood. Where can I go to have an answer to the meaning of love that is absolute? Again, the person who causes all these atoms and molecules to move in a direction of complexity, the intelligence who is love, left its imprint on our DNA. To learn this language, you must give up your personal worldview and accept that of Christ, which ironically, is everything you had before but now raised to a new level of humanity, one that fulfills the purpose that nature intended.
3. HOW CAN I ANSWER THE SIX QUESTIONS POSED BY THE DIVINE EQUATION? The Divine Equation has nothing to do with who God is but rather what the divine intelligence, love, and service have whispered to me about how I can discover how to grow deeper in my humanity (capacitas dei) and convert my life from one of unauthentic living to the truth. These six questions are A. What is the purpose of life?; B. What is my life’s purpose as found in that purpose of life above? C. What does reality look like? D. How does it all fit together? E. How to love fiercely? And, F. I know I am going to die; now what? Both the questions and answers come from a power higher than myself. The template for the way, the truth, and the life comes from my accessing The Christ Principle. This is done not directly with speech but through synchronicity with God in the silence and solitude of my heart. I must use human examples unrelated to my questions and answers to understand not who God is but who God is like in my human experiences. And where do I find the key to these examples, similes, parables, stories, and readings? The Christ Principle tells and shows me. As I have discovered, the whole tremendous realm of the Sacred is the purpose of my humanity, something that is enduring past death, something in life that suggests humans’ next step in evolution is to be an adopted son or daughter of this Sacred. Not everyone sees this, nor is in the condition, mentally or spiritually, to absorb being in the presence of the Sacred and just waiting. Waiting is not something I am known for. Being impatient and picky is more my style. Yet, If I am to listen to the whispers from God, I must at least be in the presence of the Sacred to be able to “listen with the ear of the heart.” Going to that sacred space in the inner self, the place where I alone enter and then lock the door, is not accessible to me if I don’t know that it is even present in me. When I enter this room (Matthew 6:5), I am automatically in the presence of the Sacred and try to direct my fidgedy human nature to calm down and just listen to my heart. Because this is an acquired habit, it has taken me a long time to realize that my inner room is where I can go and listen to the Sacred communicate with me through the whispers of silence and solitude. It is a waiting room.

HOW I USE SYNCHRONICITY TO LISTEN TO THE WHISPERS OF GOD

My purpose is to share with you what I have discovered about how God communicates with us in silence and we listen to God through, with, and in the Son of God, Jesus, and how to know what God is like, not who God is.

I. SELECT A SCRIPTURE YOU WANT TO EXPLORE. Let’s take the example of Jesus (who is both divine and human in nature) on the road to Emmaus. This was after he died and rose from the dead.

Gospel

lk 24:13-35

That very day, the first day of the week,
two of Jesus’ disciples were going
to a village seven miles from Jerusalem called Emmaus,
and they were conversing about all the things that had occurred.
And it happened that while they were conversing and debating,
Jesus himself drew near and walked with them,
but their eyes were prevented from recognizing him.
He asked them,
“What are you discussing as you walk along?”
They stopped, looking downcast.
One of them, named Cleopas, said to him in reply,
“Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem
who does not know of the things
that have taken place there in these days?”
And he replied to them, “What sort of things?”
They said to him,
“The things that happened to Jesus the Nazarene,
who was a prophet mighty in deed and word
before God and all the people,
how our chief priests and rulers both handed him over
to a sentence of death and crucified him.
But we were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel;
and besides all this,
it is now the third day since this took place.
Some women from our group, however, have astounded us:
they were at the tomb early in the morning
and did not find his body;
they came back and reported
that they had indeed seen a vision of angels
who announced that he was alive.
Then some of those with us went to the tomb
and found things just as the women had described,
but him they did not see.”
And he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are!
How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke!
Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things
and enter into his glory?”
Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets,
he interpreted to them what referred to him
in all the Scriptures.
As they approached the village to which they were going,
he gave the impression that he was going on farther.
But they urged him, “Stay with us,
for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.”
So he went in to stay with them.
And it happened that, while he was with them at table,
he took bread, said the blessing,
broke it, and gave it to them.
With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him,
but he vanished from their sight.
Then they said to each other,
“Were not our hearts burning within us
while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?”
So they set out at once and returned to Jerusalem
where they found gathered together
the eleven and those with them who were saying,
“The Lord has truly been raised and has appeared to Simon!”
Then the two recounted
what had taken place on the way
and how he was made known to them in the breaking of bread.

II. USE A TOTALLY UNRELATED EXAMPLE. Using synchronicity, I view the passage where Jesus is trying to link Old Testament prophecies about Him to the Eucharist which is the Real Presence to these travelers. I looked for a way to see this morphing or transitioning from the Old Testament to the New Covenant and came up with the image of a rocket going to the moon.

• The mission is to use the rocket to go to the moon, circle it, and return.
• What does it take to achieve this mission successfully?
• There must be astronauts.
• They must be trained.
• Training facilities have to be built.
• Technology must be available to complete the mission.
• A training program must be detailed for each step and possible variations.
• There must be fuel and testing of equipment.
• There must be years of simulations using the equipment and spacesuits.
• There must be backups for astronauts in case of illness.
• There must be a spaceship with two stages plus a crew compartment.
• There must be technology that allows the spaceship to fly on the correct trajectory.
• The spaceship must be able to house three astronauts in breathable air and with the necessary water and food.
• The first stage lifts the rocket off of Earth into near orbit.
• The second stage lifts the rocket into its proper orbit to be able to circumnavigate the moon and return.
• The third stage contains human life which must have artificial means to remain alive.
• The mission is complete when the crew returns to base and briefs the mission control on what they have learned.

III. APPLY THE EXAMPLE TO THE SCRIPTURE AND NOTICE ANY PARALLELS OR CONNECTIONS

Using synchronicity, I can explore what I don’t know or what is confusing to me using an example from my experiences to help me make the parallels. In the example above, I use what I know about how a spaceship works and work through the Scripture passage using the two-stage rocket plus capsule at the top. My concern is how Jesus described the connectivity between the Old Testament and what he was proposing in the new covenant. I could have used the concept of new wine in old sins, also, but I wrote a book on this subject.

THE DIET

Here is a blog I wrote sometime back there that is relevant.

Although I try mightily, I am constantly tempted to stop any attempts at contemplation. This is like a runner who must find a mental challenge, as well as the physical one of running the distance. In one of my Lectio Divina meditations, I found myself thinking about why it is so difficult to focus on being in the presence of God. I think the reason has to do with original sin, the condition in which all humans find themselves. Spirituality is the act of raising us up beyond this natural default of our nature, to attempt to think about invisible reality. Spirituality, much less contemplation, is not natural. It takes work, it demands focus, it requires energy and not the energy you get from working out at the gym. I think of that when I am driving the five hours (one way) from Tallahassee, Florida to Conyers, Georgia, once a month. My wife keeps harping me that I don’t need to travel to the Lay Cistercian Gathering Day at Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery. I can pray anywhere. Why waste money we don’t have (actually we do). This is taking up the cross DAILY to follow Christ, being tempted that all this God stuff is irrelevant.  Even when trying to move from self to God by using the Lectio Divina method, contemplation is always with its temptations to do something that is profitable, that will make a difference, that won’t take so much wasted time. Contemplation is an elusive treasure and demands my full attention.

Contemplation, in a manner of speaking, is like a diet. Your physician tells you that you need to lose weight. Now comes the hard part. What diet will you choose, or, if the physician gives you one, will you take it seriously? Based on my own feeble attempts to diet, here are some observations of how a diet applies to contemplation.

1. I won’t diet unless my reasons for doing it outweigh my reasons for not doing it (laziness). Cancer, cardiac arrest, and diabetes are three good reasons for me that outweigh not doing it, and even then, I am tempted to take the low road.
2. No one should diet by themselves. They need the support from community, family, and friends.
3. I will be tempted, almost every minute, to abandon my goal and eat the forbidden fruit. Makes you sympathetic to Adam and Eve, don’t you think? Doing contemplation is just like that. There is no winning the prize without struggle and practice/failure/practice.
4. The prize is worth the time you take to master it. Ask anyone who has lost weight and not gained it back; ask anyone who has even come close to catching a glimpse of the love of Christ through contemplation, and they will tell you.
5. Failure is not a waste of time when you try so hard. What is real failure is losing your will to diet and giving up totally. Because we exist in a condition of original sin (we have to struggle to do what is right), contemplation is not automatic. It takes work, time, and acceptance of our human frailties.
6. There are many diets out there, all claiming to be “the one” to save you and help you lose weight. They probably all work. There are many practices out there to help you reach your purpose in life, contemplation being only one of them. To do diets and contemplation justice, you need to perform them consistently and persistently.
7. Diets are the only tools to help you reach your goal. So too, contemplation is only a methodology to place you in a frame of mind to meet the source of all peace, joy, and love. The end is not contemplation but being one with the One.

IV. USING A MYTHIC STORY TO TELL A FUNDAMENTAL TRUTH ABOUT HUMAN NATURE

The Book of Genesis gets a bad press, often because of the way people treat it. All the books of the Scriptures are a library of what is good and evil in life. Another way to say that is these are resources that people had, experiments of what works or what doesn’t if you will, as it pertains to putting God as the Principle against which you ask the answer to the three cosmic questions and the Divine Equation. The Scriptures do contain errors and faults. So do you. St. John says that the purpose of the books deemed by the Early Church to contain revelation from God through people is that we use the stories and examples to learn from the past as to what happens to people when they place God at their center and the consequences of putting in a false god (ourselves, money, fortune, sex, the church, any pope, any religious person). (John 20:30-31). Galileo, yes, that Galileo, told us “The Scriptures do not tell us how the heavens go, but how to go to heaven.”

THE SYNCHRONICITY OF THE BOOK OF GENESIS

Genesis, the first book of the Pentateuch, contains a flood of stories meant to probe the very depths of what it means to be a human and provide its readers with the tools to answer three questions:

• What does it mean to have human nature?
• What does it mean to love?
• What is the purpose of life itself?

Yes, these books (a library of collected stories and similies) describe, rather than define the unseen God and those all too prone to make the wrong choices, Adam and Eve. Did Adam and Eve really live? Of course, they did and continue to do so in our human condition which some term Original Sin.

The setting in Chapters 2-3 is a garden, a paradise for those who wrote and read the writings of people listening to the whispers of God in their hearts. There is the ideal, of heaven, and then a fall from grace due to pride and disobedience to what God says we should do to be fully human. God began creation with his DNA or fingerprints on each atom. There is an automatic pattern here called natural law. The disruptors of this flow did not stop it but caused dissonance in the resonance of the natural course of THINGS. The THINGS became LIFE and the LIFE moved forward in completity to HUMAN rationality. This is not the end of our evolutional thinking, as described by Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit Paleontologist and writer who addresses the three universes the physical universe, the mental universe, and the spiritual universe.

Life, in the cosmic and my own chunk of it (83 years so far) is characterized by both consciousness and complexity. This consciousness comes from my personal assimilation of my environment in this world (outside of the Garden of Eden) and how I make sense of it to push forward to my destiny as a human who has evolved past our humanity to become a higher species, although not divine in nature. This is the movement and complexity of our human race toward Omega, as Teilhard describes it. I am the sum of my choices, both good and wrong (sin), and how I transform myself, despite the limitations of my humanity, to move forward. As God, points out in Genesis, it is God’s way, God’s truth, and God’s life that we need in us, if I am to fulfill the natural destiny of our species. Jesus, became human in nature to lift us up to what nature intended but humanity did to blunt the intelligent progression of our species. All human life exists in the form that lives and dies, having learned as much as possible about those three questions above. One thing about our spirituality that we need to realize is, that all life progresses from Alpha in movement and complexity, but humans alone have reason and the ability to freely choose what they consider to make them fulfilled. God says, “This is the way through the minefield of life, this is the truth because it is beyond human frailty and confusion, and this is the life you must lead, one of being an adopted son or daughter of the Father, and capable of reaching the highest level of humanity (for example, the Blessed Mother) and the capacity to sustain that energy through, with, and in Christ. I am now. God is now. Genesis is now. Adam and Eve are now. That there is a succession of now’s (movement) where I can grow in Christ (cpacitas dei) towards being fully human is no accident. Some discover this Divine Equation, while others deny it, and still others don’t care (which I observe as the vast majority of humans, even Catholics). How does one know that anyone cares? Jesus told us that there is but one rule: love each other as He has loved us (the cross). Each person who is Baptized of water and the Holy Spirit possesses dual citizenship (on earth until our body dies) and (on earth until our body does and we claim our inheritance as a citizen of heaven.

Synchronicity is one way for humans to listen to the whispers of God as we move in complexity toward Omega.