Inner Sanctuary Podcast: Recent Episodes
Liz Rees / Knox United Church (Calgary)
Welcome to the Inner Sanctuary podcast, a weekly program for everyone who wants to deepen their practice of meditation. With Liz Rees at Knox United Church (Calgary).
We are setting out on an inner pilgrimage through Lent. We journey inwards together through times of uncertainty, struggle, transition, and bewilderment. In his book Still Possible, poet David Whyte writes: “For the road to Santiago, don’t make declarations about what to bring and what to leave behind. Bring what you have.”
Our world needs people who love. Our world needs people who are kind. We can be both through the practice of loving kindness. Heart-felt love illuminating every broken thing it finds is a perfect description of the practice of loving kindness. It is an outpouring coming from compassion.
When we consider an inner diamond, we may want to remember that diamonds are formed in the depths and under pressure. It might take us a long time on the spiritual road to feel it in ourselves and see it in others, beneath the surface, like that treasure hidden in a field that Jesus described.
“Love liberates. It doesn’t just hold—that’s ego. Love liberates.” These are words of wisdom from the late poet and civil rights leader Maya Angelou. Our culture, Angelou says, is “stuck in almost a juvenile, puerile understanding of love.” This is the idea of possessing someone as opposed to setting them free, of getting rather than giving.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu left behind a faith-fueled legacy of compassion. We can draw on his inspiration. “Disturb us, O Lord, he wrote, “when we are too well-pleased with ourselves, when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little, because we sailed too close to the shore.”
It is a radical and life-changing practice to follow Jesus’s advice about prayer. We are invited to step into solitude and close the door. No public display, no bragging rights, no distractions. We leave the ego at the door.
Jesus toppled the conventions of his day. He called his followers into intimacy with God, who he referred to as Abba, a term of endearment, tenderness and closeness. He did not tell his followers to make grandiose gestures of devotion. He directed them to get quiet and get real.
The Christmas story is infused by the night sky. We have the “star of wonder, star of night,” the “midnight clear,” the holy night with “the stars brightly shining” just to name a few. Our own tradition invites us into a cosmic liturgy, but are we participating?
Richard Rohr reminds us that when we speak of Advent, we’re not just talking about Jesus being born 2000 years ago. “In fact, we’re welcoming the Universal Christ, the Cosmic Christ, the Christ that is forever being born in the human soul and into history.”
A beautiful Taizé chant can guide us through Advent, and we can turn to it whenever we feel lost, alone, or overwhelmed. The following line is sung again and again: “Within our darkest night, you kindle the fire that never dies away, never dies away.”
The ‘dark night’ speaks to this time of year, to the Advent journey towards the holy birth, and to the times on the spiritual journey when we are bereft and stripped down to utter humility. St. John of the Cross describes the dark night as “sheer grace” because it allows us to find what burns in our hearts. We would never be inclined to do so otherwise.
As we travel through the darkness to the nativity, we can ask ourselves, what is aching to be born in our own lives? What wants to break through the darkness in the form of new life?
Meister Eckhart said we are all meant to be mothers of God. “What good is it to me if Mary is full of grace and if I am not also full of grace?” he asked, and, “What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to the Son if I also do not give birth to him in my time and my culture?”
If we ask ourselves, “Who am I?” and really sit with the question, we may find ourselves without a clear answer. We think we should know. We think we should be able to define ourselves readily with some kind of singular identity. But that is not how we are.
One of Thomas Merton’s most compelling spiritual writings is his last chapter of New Seeds of Contemplation, entitled The General Dance. In it he describes the “silence of the spheres as the music of wedding feast” and the world and time as “the dance of the Lord in emptiness.”
WIn his book A Sacred Voice is Calling, John Neafsey describes witnessing a group of very poor people praying in front of a statue of the crucified Christ in a church in Guatemala: “Each person, in their turn, went to the foot of the cross, and, as they prayed quietly about whatever was on their minds or in their hearts, they reached up and literally clung to the legs of Jesus…. I suspect that some of them were hanging onto him for dear life.”
What does it mean to see with the eyes of the heart? Mystic theologian Cynthia Bourgeault calls us to know and experience heart-centred spiritual perception: “According to the great wisdom traditions of the West (Christian, Jewish, Islamic), the heart is first and foremost an organ of spiritual perception. Its primary function is to look beyond the obvious, the boundaried surface of things, and see into a deeper reality….”
Letting go is happening all around us as we head towards winter. Trees are great teachers of release. If we want to find inner peace, we’ll have to apprentice to them.
When we practice centering prayer, we are letting go. We are letting go of our thoughts and petitions and remaining in silent receptivity, and, most importantly, we are letting go of our personal agendas and maps. Thomas Keating wrote, “This prayer is a journey into the unknown. It is a call to follow Jesus out of all the structures, security blankets and even spiritual practices that serve as props for the ego.”
We all have trauma in our lives. None of us has been loved perfectly or loved others perfectly. We all carry unresolved pain and we all deserve tenderness and compassion.
Dr. Gabor Mate, a renowned addiction expert who has spent many years working on the lower east side of Vancouver, says that the many forms of addiction in our society are coming from our endless search to relieve past pain and trauma and to externally fill a void we feel inside: “There are many, many addictions. Yes, there’s the addiction to drugs, but there’s also the addiction to consumerism, the addiction to sex, to the internet, to food. For each person there’s a different way of feeding the emptiness.”
Contemplative practice allows us to awaken this inner knowing, also known as wisdom. Thomas Merton names it Sophia, the feminine name for divine wisdom according to the Judeo Christian tradition. In his soul stirring writing on Sophia, he names wisdom as an “invisible fecundity” flowing from the depths of the divine: “I am awakened, I am born again at the voice of this, my Sister, sent to me from the depths of the divine fecundity.”
Ojibway writer Richard Wagamese wrote a lot about silence. In silence, he said, we touch truth and allow our hearts to shift: “There are motions of the heart that occur only in quiet rooms, in the splendour of solitude where nothing and everything exists at the same time. Being and becoming have their confluence in these moments of touching your essence. You feel yourself to be a part of the great wheel of creative, nurturing, loving, benevolent energy that is spinning around us all the time.”
Contemplative community will allow us to journey together, stepping off the shoreline into the unknown, with others, in utter authenticity and drawing on collective wisdom. “We may not know exactly where the journey will take us,” says Newell. “We can know, however, that in opening to the journey we feel more alive, more true. In opening to the journey together we can be part of nurturing hope in one another .…”
How do we truly light the fire of love in our lives? We all know the core teaching of Jesus to love God with all our hearts and love our neighbors as ourselves, but has it become a pat phrase? How do we actually live it?
Thomas Merton pulls us deeply into an ‘I Thou’ awareness that changes everything:
Contemplation is not a trance or ecstasy not emotional fire and sweetness that come with religious exaltation not enthusiasm, not the sense of being “seized” by an elemental force and swept into liberation by mystical frenzy.
Contemplation is no pain-killer. In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he (she) no longer knows what God is; this is a great gain, because “God is not a what,” not a “thing.”
There is “no such thing” as God because God is neither a “what” nor a thing” but a pure “Who,” the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs into awareness.
In his book, The Great Spiritual Migration, Brian McLaren wrote, “Conversion involves repentance—a radical rethinking. It includes remorse—for harm done in the name of our faith. But conversion means more than being sorry; it means becoming different.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin can light a fire in us. He wasn’t afraid of what science was revealing. Science, he said, reveals God to us. For him, evolution was the heart of spiritual life, and our job to lovingly grow and expand. “The heart of Teilhard de Chardin’s spirituality is truly linked to the transfiguration of ordinary life into an ardent adventure of the spirit,” writes Ursula King. “As Teilhard understood evolution as an increasing process of spiritualization, he was particularly interested in the awakening and rise of the spirit in the world.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit and paleontologist, is one of the heavyweight Christian mystics we need to know and integrate in our times. Teilhard died in 1955 but he left a vast body of work that profoundly named the earth as hallowed ground.
Teilhard scholar Ursula King says, “For Teilhard the heart of God is found at the heart of the world, and the living, natural world is shot through with the presence of the divine, with what he eventually was to call ‘the divine milieu.’”
What would happen if we actually saw all living beings as members of our community? How would our life change if we lived Thomas Berry’s plea to see the world as a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects?
In this year of change, we stand at both personal and collective thresholds. A threshold implies crossing into new territory. It is more than a transition–it is deeper. We have some obvious thresholds, such as our birth and death, and the significant passages in between. We also have the unseen spiritual thresholds, the times when we are guided into unknown territory and deep authenticity. Irish poet and priest John O’Donohue teaches that the word threshold comes from the word thresh: “To cross a threshold is to leave behind the husk and arrive at the grain.” As Meister Eckhart taught: “If you want the kernel, you must break the shell.”
So often we leave out the body, as if it has nothing to do with our spiritual life. Symeon the New Theologian, who lived over a thousand years ago as a Byzantine monk, teaches otherwise:
We awaken in Christ’s body as Christ awakens our bodies, and my poor hand is Christ. He enters my foot and is infinitely me.
Thomas Merton experienced an inner realization of love when he was standing on an ordinary street corner: “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness …. I almost laughed out loud …. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
Our very breath is our connection to all that is holy and unifying. Richard Rohr teaches that the first word we ever spoke was the name of God, and the last word we will speak at death will be the name of God. This teaching comes from the Hebrew word YHWH, usually translated at Yahweh, the sacred name of God. This name, he explains, is not to be vocalized but breathed, for it replicates the sound of an inhalation (YH) and exhalation (WH).
What is true community and how might we start building it from inside out? Author Toko-pa Turner says loneliness is not the absence of people in our lives. It is, rather, our inability to communicate what we find important. Too often we have traded true belonging for surface participation. “The difference between ‘fitting in’ and belonging is that fitting in, by its very definition, is to parcel off our wholeness in exchange for acceptance.”
We have all been touched by Mystery. These are the moments when we stop and see the grandeur of our world, or something simple, sacred and beautiful—the eyes of a baby or a night sky of endless stars.
In his book Mystic Heart, Wayne Teasdale said our mysticism is our most precious wisdom:
We don’t need to enter monasteries to become mystics or to cultivate our spirituality. We are all mystics! The mystic heart is the deepest part of who or what we really are.
Meister Eckhart wrote, “We sink eternally from letting go to letting go into God.” What could be a more beautiful practice for Lent?
All of us have places within us that need to be blessed and held and healed. Our spiritual journey walks us into these places with grace. Singer Audrey Assad calls us into Shiloh, a place where we can find tranquility and be made whole. In the song, she wrote:
May loving kindness Calm the raging of the wound May your healing Be a clearing in the wood May you breathe in Deeper than you ever could before
In our pilgrimage through Lent, perhaps we are coming closer to the essence of what and who is driving our spiritual journey. Rilke’s poem “Go to the Limits of Your Longing” expresses the voice of the Divine inviting our full participation:
You, sent out beyond your recall Go to the limits of your longing. Embody me.
Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in.
Thomas Merton wrote, “We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real … and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists.”
Entering the wilderness means stepping off the well-worn path and into unfamiliar territory. Author Alice Walker’s insights about inner change are well worth putting in our backpack: “Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before.”
As we begin the spiritual journey of Lent almost a year into the pandemic, we may feel a deep sense of inertia and want to sleep until spring and vaccines arrive. What if we did the exact opposite? What if we stepped into the journey bravely?
Poet David Whyte wrote,
Start close in, don’t take the second step or the third, start with the first thing close in, the step you don’t want to take.
As we move through this long winter and ongoing pandemic conditions that keep us apart, perhaps we are noticing a force within us that wants to burst into life. And perhaps we’re noticing that the way we were living prior to the pandemic is not exactly what we have in mind. Poet Wendell Berry calls us to practice resurrection. “So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing .... Practice resurrection.”
Rainer Maria Rilke described our human experience as the trembling pause between two musical notes, our birth and our death. Contemplating impermanence brings out both trembling and beauty as we know our time is short and precious.
Bruce Cockburn has poured out songs since 1970, and among them are many spiritual gems. His song Fascist Architecture is a potent description of the process of transformation from inner imprisonment to spiritual freedom.
In her potent song Mercy Now, American folk singer Mary Gauthier captured the times we are living in and the ache we feel inside, especially when we see public and private sentiment turning away from compassion. The song is an invocation of mercy and grace.
My church and my country could use a little mercy now As they sink into a poisoned pit That’s going to take forever to climb out They carry the weight of the faithful Who follow them down I love my church and country And they could use some mercy now
It’s a new year, so why not start it with a wide-open heart? That all-embracing love can be our human expression of agape, a spiritual term which expresses the unconditional outflowing of the holy spirit.
This year of pandemic has sent us searching, perhaps more deeply than before, for the inner light and love that will see us through. Inviting the light into our state of admitted brokenness is inner radical hospitality. Leonard Cohen poignantly describes what it is like to reach out for grace in dark times:
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That's how the light gets in
As we walk the Advent journey, the nights are getting longer, and this year many of us are experiencing more stillness and solitude than ever before. It is dark and it is deep. In her book Learning to Walk in the Dark, theologian Barbara Brown Taylor says, “New life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.”
“There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and sometimes there is so much traffic going on in your minds, so many different kinds of signals, so many vast impulses floating through your organism that go back thousands of generations, long before you were even a thought in the mind of creation, and you are buffeted by these, and in the midst of all of this you have got to find out what your name is. Who are you? How does the sound of the genuine come through to you?”
In his book Invitation to Love, Thomas Keating describes what he calls the false self with its “emotional programs for happiness.” To be a follower of Christ, he says, means changing the direction in which we are looking for happiness. Instead of following our hidden (and not so hidden) motivations for security, affection, and power/control, we go inwards and consent to “divine therapy.”
Many people are describing the times we are in with the word Kairos, meaning a time of crisis, chaos and unravelling, but also unstoppable transformation, conversion and grace. In her essay “We Were Made for These Times,” Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls for “souls on deck” as we weather the storm.
In his poem “Last Night as I Was Sleeping,” Spanish poet Antonio Machado concludes:
Last night as I slept, I dreamt—marvelous error!— that it was God I had here inside my heart.
Mystical theologian Howard Thurman (1899-1981) wrote: “There is in every person an inward sea, and in that sea there is an island, and on that island there is an altar, and standing guard before the altar is the angel with a flaming sword.”
Our world needs peace, and that means our world needs people who practice peace, deeply.
Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) says “The Kingdom of God is here and now. I don’t need to die to be in the Kingdom of God. In fact, I need to be very much alive.” The key, he says, is presence, and to be aware that, “I think, therefore I am not present.”
Brother David Steindl-Rast says that gratitude comes from becoming conscious of our interconnection and dependence on each other. Recognizing our interconnection wakes us up so that our gratitude can flow, and gratitude is synonymous with joy: “Look closely and you will find that people are happy because they are grateful. The opposite of gratefulness is just taking everything for granted.”
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” ––Carl Sagan
At Inner Sanctuary on September 24, 2020, we explored resting in God by becoming nap warriors. Tricia Hersey, creator of The Nap Ministry, is changing the narrative on rest: “The everyday pace of our culture is not healthy, sustainable, nor liberative. … Anyone who goes against this pace is living as an outlier and a risk-taker. It is warrior style resistance to push back and disrupt this reality.”
At Inner Sanctuary on September 17, 2020, we meditated on John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul.
At Inner Sanctuary on September 10, 2020, we bookended rewired beatitudes by Nadia Bolz-Weber with Matthew Fox’s mantra, "do it to the least, you do it to me."
At Inner Sanctuary on September 3, 2020, we meditated on the Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila.
At Inner Sanctuary on August 27, 2020, we did the welcoming prayer with a letting go practice.
At Inner Sanctuary on August 20, 2020, we meditated on a way through heavy feelings (feeling like shit) by allowing, authentically feeling faith, and ultimately moving toward connection/compassion.
At Inner Sanctuary on August 13, 2020, we meditated on the names of God, drawing our inspiration from Matthew Fox’s Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God.
At Inner Sanctuary on August 6, 2020, we meditated on lovingkindness to all … including the “Garys” in our life.