The sun was actually shining—a rarity this spring in Vancouver. I imagined having my early morning cup of coffee and going to the ocean while the sun was still out. My wife, Ann, had a different agenda. Get the chores done. Then play. First on the agenda, the police record check that I had put off for two months. On the way, I realized that I hadn’t quite come to terms with the agenda shift. The MOOD descended. This is the point at which an enlightened person would invoke the Witness, and cut The MOOD off at the pass.

Instead, I’m standing in line at a police station on a slow burn, wondering what the hell we did before there were police record checks.  How did we ever manage not to hire axe murderers, I’m thinking to myself holding ticket number 76 waiting in a lineup and not walking on a beach with a sweet caffeine buzz.  The nice young woman is asking for two, count ‘em, two pieces of “government issued ID”.  I’m half way there, with my driver’s license, which doesn’t even come close to impressing the young woman. Yep, you guessed it, back home for the passport. It’s only a 20-minute drive, but the back and forths add up to 1 ½ hours of not walking on a sunny beach. And I’m feeling it, all the way home and back. The Witness gone officially gone awol, or better yet, entered the witness protection program, safe from my simmering rage.

Next chore. The bank. A simple deposit. In and out. Then, the beach. Well, the officious young bank teller notices that the cheques are made out to me personally and not to my business. Never mind that this has been happening for the last 18 months. The problem was that one of the cheques, I later discovered, exceeded the limits of this teller’s authority to deposit. She sought out her supervisor, who sought out the manager, who sought out official word from the central office in Toronto, who came to the same conclusion as the teller, twenty-five minutes ago. I was neither friendly, nor understanding by this point. But ever resilient in the face of evolutionary challenges, I thought of a brilliant solution. I’d open up a personal chequing account, and then immediately transfer the money to my business account. And in the process have the pleasure of screwing this ridiculously bureaucratic banking system.

Yes, I could do that I’m told, but I’d need to talk to the account manager, who would be available in 20 minutes. Thirty-five minutes later, I’m sitting across from another young woman who insists on calling me Mr. Bruce, despite having my single, government-issued piece of ID which shows that my last name is clearly Sanguin. After the fourth “Mr. Bruce”, I show her the license and tell her that my name is Mr. Sanguin. I’m trying breath work at this point, but it’s not working. I can feel a virtual cascade of hormones—not the good ones—flowing into my blood stream. Gun control was made for moments like this.

Forty-five minutes later, the account manager escorts me back to the teller, informing on the way that the transfer to my chequing account will take at least five business days. So much for my brilliant solution. So, that’s the morning. I look at the sky and notice the clouds are starting to roll in.

I arrive home in a sweat, wondering if enlightened masters like Ken Wilber, Andrew Cohen, Adi Da, or Eckhart Tolle, do their own banking, or ever have to deal with police record checks. I mean what good is Witnessing consciousness if you’re never pissed off enough to truly test it?

I calm down over lunch. The phone rings. It’s the police. They need my fingerprints, because I’ll be dealing with the elderly and children. “Why”, I ask as calmly as possible, “did you not get my fingerprints while I was there this morning—twice.” The young man (and everybody these days is younger than me in case you haven’t noticed) tells me that I left too quickly. I’ve had it. I ask him if it isn’t true that the man processing me earlier was in training, and that he handed me the receipt for $95.00 (a tax grab for the city), thanked me, and told me to have a nice day. He says yes that was true, and yes, it was possible that the trainee made an error. “Why” I ask, “would you therefore imply that this was my error?”

In any case, the peace officer replies, we generally need fingerprints in a situation like yours. “Generally”, I snap back, or “mandatorily”? “Sir, you need to come back and be finger-printed.” My wife suggests that we get in the car and do this immediately, or it might never get done. I refuse. I did eventually get to the beach. The clouds stayed away. I aged ten years.

This is where the evolutionary spiritual path is tested, in the trenches of a partner who has a different agenda for the day, cumbersome bureaucratic systems, employees in training who just happen to be at the end of the line you’ve chosen, and overly scheduled lives. I failed spectacularly.

“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, ²⁵ of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, ²⁶ the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. ²⁷ To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. ²⁸ Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. ²⁹ For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.”[1]

In my last post I presented Teilhard’s idea that we are invited to transform our passivities of diminishment (all that we must undergo not of our own volition) into passivities of growth of the body of Christ. A couple of you replied wondering whether this shed some light on the above passage from Colossians: “Now ^jI rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh ^kI am filling up ^lwhat is lacking in Christ’s afflictions ^mfor the sake of his body, that is, the church…”

It seems clear that the writer understood himself to be completing what Christ started—and this is the role of the church. It’s worth noting that the writer of John’s gospel also has Jesus praying to the Father that the disciples would complete his joy (John 17:13). Within an evolutionary theology this notion of subsequent generations of Christians completing both the joy and the suffering of Jesus isn’t at all problematic. In fact, one would expect that in an unfinished universe completing what was begun in Jesus would be an organic mission.

The incarnation of the Christ known in Jesus manifested the divine desire for the perfection (or completion) of the cosmos. The suffering of Jesus (passio = passivities in Teilhard) is a representation, encapsulation, as well as an empathic response of G_d to the inevitable suffering one would expect within an unfinished cosmos striving toward the perfection. Teilhard calls this process of consciously completing what was begun in Jesus the “Omega Project”— the Omega Point being the convergence and completion of creation’s yearning to realize the love and wisdom of G_d.

While there is a tendency to focus on our creative agency (activities of growth) in evolutionary spirituality, the evolution of the cosmos may in fact be accelerated as much by the way in which we respond to our passivities of diminishment. As Jesus transformed violence into suffering on the cross, (whereas we are biologically wired to transform suffering into violence), so we are challenged to undergo those things over which we have no control in a way that nevertheless reflects the impulse for completion/perfection.  “Turn the other cheek”, “walk the extra mile”, “love your enemy” — all of these injunctions run contrary to our natural instincts. This doesn’t make our natural instincts “wrong”. Rather they are early manifestations of a spirit- rising in the universe, an expression of this mysterious evocation of spirit from matter.

As we undergo these passivities of diminishment we may choose as a spiritual discipline to complete or “fill up” what is “lacking in Christ’s afflictions”. In truth, to inhabit this realm of becoming means that there is a kind of natural suffering of all creatures (including humans) as manifestations of an imperfect, evolving universe. Illness, grief, aging, innocent suffering, death itself (and not only having to undergo these diminishments, but to be consciously aware that we will undergo them) means that to be and become is to suffer. They don’t signify, as some atheists claim, the absence of G_d, but rather a cosmos-in-process drawn by the promise of perfection.

Notice Paul’s explicitly developmental spirituality. In the passage above, he envisions everybody growing in wisdom, so that “we may present everyone mature in Christ”. What’s more, he understands his own “toil” as being undertaken with the very energy of Christ (29). He is himself, with the church, the body of Christ evolving through the very diminishments that to the world looks like evidence of divine abandonment. And for him, this suffering is integral to the maturing of the body of Christ (which in Teilhard’s theology is the entire universe in process).

The mystery that was hidden from the ages and generations (implicit in all of creation, but only now being manifested through the conscious awareness of humans) is now revealed. “The mystery, which is Christ in you—the hope of glory” (27). In other words, the Christ (Word/Logos/Wisdom) that brought forth a universe and was incarnate in all cosmic forms and especially in Jesus of Nazareth, is now showing up in, as, and through you and this community called “church”. This is the “hope of glory” because we are one with that which we are yearning to complete. With Paul, we are animated ^“with all his (her) energy that s/he powerfully works within [us]” (29).

I’ve been re-reading the Divine Milieu and continue to be amazed by the mind of Teilhard de Chardin. You readers will know that he was both a respected scientist (a paleontologist) and Catholic priest, who was banished to China, as a way of keeping him out of the lecture halls of Paris.

Teilhard claims that every life experience fits into two categories:  ”activities” and “passivities”. Activities are acts of agency, stuff that we make happen, like frying an egg or reading a book.  Passivities are things and influences that must endure, undergo, or suffer—stuff that happens to us. Activities consist of all the choices that we make as free agents. In Teilhard’s opinion, these are relatively rare, but very important. Our passivities, all the stuff that happens to us, from genetic inheritance, family of origin influences, decisions that other people make, the weather, viral and bacterial infections, aging and disease, or my wife turning off the television before I’m ready  (you get the idea) are far more prevalent. It’s all the stuff that happens that I have little or no control over.

Right off the bat, we can see that he wouldn’t have had a lot of patience with the core idea of  The Secret, that we create our own reality absolutely. There is much that we simply endure and suffer. Of course, our activity is re-engaged in how we respond to these passivities. But, c’mon, let’s give up the illusion of absolute control. Second, it’s an important corrective to some forms of evolutionary spirituality that can get carried away with what I call a theology of glory. We tend to focus exclusively on the role of our “activities” and don’t spend enough time working through how even our passivities contribute to the evolving body of Christ. Don’t get me wrong. Teilhard’s spirituality is brilliant in the way in which he sees our activities as actually serving the evolution of the universe. But, remember, he suffered under the authority of the church, rendering his theology virtually unknown in his lifetime.

There are activities of growth and diminishment, and passivities of growth and diminishment. The goal, through conscious intention, is to evolve the body of Christ in both our activities (stuff we make happen as agents) and our passivities (stuff we must undergo). The cool thing about activities of growth is that they are our normal, everyday activities—the work we do, the relationships we enjoy, how we buy groceries, etc. What matters is conscious intention. We don’t have to be creating the Sistine Chapel to be growing the body of Christ. We diminish the evolution of Christ’s body through activities of diminishment, like playing the victim, and an active refusal to grow.

A passivity of growth is something that happens to me (which I had nothing to do with) like being born into a family that values ecological stewardship and good education, and which enhances the evolution of the universe. In other words, luck. A passivity of diminishment is something that happens to me that obstructs progress, like being born into a family that watches six hours of television a day, or being born in  slum in Rio De Janiero. So you end up with something like the following, and it’s an interesting exercise to fill out each quadrant for yourself.

Passivities of growth can evoke gratitude or a sense of entitlement. Activities of growth can serve the evolving body of Christ 0r self-aggrandizement. Activities of diminishment may elicit repentance or denial. Passivities of diminishment may evoke courage and detachment or bitterness and victimhood. It depends on our orientation—our trust in deep cosmic purpose (faith), or lack thereof. To be “in Christ” is to see one’s life as contributing in both our activities and passivities to the evolution of Christ’s body.

Where I find Teilhard’s perspective most enlightening is his take on the passivities of diminishment. Nasty stuff happens to us, as it did to Jesus, that we neither deserved or expected. As we endure these passivities as our own (despite being a genuine victim), we contribute to the activity of Christ’s evolution in the universe. Our passivities become Christ’s activity! Paradoxically, we are called to fight the diminishment with every fibre in our body (“Take this cup from my lips”), and yet engage the diminishment detached from the outcome (“Yet, not my will, but thine”)

I listened to Canadian Olympic speed-skating champion, Clara Hughes, being interviewed on CBC yesterday. What an amazing athlete. At 41 she has switched sports. Now she plans on winning a gold medal in cycling, Which means that she must completely reshape her body. One thing that won’t be changing is her lung capacity to hold oxygen. It’s ridiculously high. In a recent cycling race through the mountains, she beat a number of world class male cyclists. Chuckling, she told her interviewer that these men got “chicked”. That’s the term, apparently, for women beating men at sports events.

From an evolutionary perspective, one of the great transformation narratives of the 20th century is how society is in the process of “getting chicked”. I don’t mean this in the least derogatorily. Call it the rise of feminist consciousness or feminine power, but it seems clear that we’re making up for millenia of suppressed (and oppressed) feminine. (I realize that even using metaphors of feminine and masculine is controversial. Some feminist critiques call this impulse to label certain qualities either masculine or feminine “essentialism”. And given that patriarchy historically devalued these so-called feminine characteristics—receptivity, empathy, holistic thinking, right brain, dark, Earth, etc.—a good case can be made for this position.) Check out my friend, Chris Dierkes critique of these categories in a review of a colleague’s book.

Regardless of where you land on that issue, young men are having a hard go of it. See this article in the Atlantic by Kate Bolick on her decision to remain single and live in community with women, rather than choosing to be with what she calls the generation of “dead-beat” or “playboy” young men.

“Over the past half century, women have steadily gained on—and are in some ways surpassing—men in education and employment. From 1970 (seven years after the Equal Pay Act was passed) to 2007, women’s earnings grew by 44 percent, compared with 6 percent for men. In 2008, women still earned just 77 cents to the male dollar—but that figure doesn’t account for the difference in hours worked, or the fact that women tend to choose lower-paying fields like nursing or education. A 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that the women actually earned 8 percent more than the men. Women are also more likely than men to go to college: in 2010, 55 percent of all college graduates ages 25 to 29 were female.”

And …as Hanna Rosin laid out  in “The End of Men,” July/August 2010), men have been rapidly declining—in income, in educational attainment, and in future employment prospects—relative to women. As of last year, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, up from 26 percent in 1980. Today women outnumber men not only in college but in graduate school; they earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded in 2010, and men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.”

This phenomenon is not restricted to the Western and Northern Hemispheres. A feature of all microbanking programs of which I am aware make their loans exclusively available to women, not men. Women are regarded to be trustworthy, entrepreneurial, and collaborative while men are simply regarded as part of the problem. As far as I can tell in the world of microbanking this assumption is rarely questioned.

The church is also getting chicked, as the majority of seminary students are now women, and when I look around at my congregation it is becoming increasingly difficult to find good men (frankly) to serve in positions of leadership. I realize that when I say “good” I mean men with the capacity to leave spaces in the conversation, to have their minds changed, to be flexible and creative in their thinking, and to be able to handle being wrong occasionally. Generally speaking, it is becoming difficult to find men who are have sophisticated relationship skills. Many of the young men who are coming to church seem to be having more difficulty getting on with their lives than the young women. Admittedly, this is not based in empirical research. But here’s a piece that does track gender trends in the Church of England. In that church men still hold most of the power, but it seems inevitable that this too is in the process of being “chicked”. If trends continue, by 2028 men will have all but disappeared from church.

Clara Hughes is showing that men cannot take even our physical superiority for granted. For 10,000 years we have “enjoyed” an assumed superiority based exclusively on genetics and the social construction of gender. It’s all changing. That’s a good thing. It represents nothing less than an evolutionary provocation for men to collectively step up and into the fullness of our humanity. We are being required to consciously evolve.

I’m interested in hearing what you think about this? Is it true? Does it matter? What are the long-term implications?

When I was growing up I must have memorized thousands of songs. I don’t have a memory of ever saying to myself, “I’m going to memorize every song that comes on the radio.”  It seemed to be an unconscious passion. I remember walking with Gary Last to hockey practice in the middle of a Winnipeg winter, with our duffle bags full of equipment slung over our shoulders, and we’d be working on songs. It could be any kind of music. I had an old turntable beside my bed that stacked LPs one on top of the other. I went to sleep listening to five or six albums. My tastes were eclectic to say the least. I memorized an entire Mills Brothers album: Paper Doll, Once More Round the Block, And All the World Will Be Mine. But I could also sing, word for word, most of the songs on Elton John’s Yellow Brick Road album. Man, I still love that album.

When I started playing guitar, I had this uncanny ability again to memorize quickly. I can go to a party and literally play all night, once I get started. Mercifully, I learned some time ago now, that hearing me play all night is not an unqualified pleasure for a great many people! My unconscious uses this storehouse of songs to alert myself (and everybody else) to what I’m actually feeling. Out pops a song, and it’s a fairly trustworthy reflection of my interior state. Or sometimes it’s just the feeling that a melody provokes.

I can get pretty heavy in these posts. Thought you folks would like to know that I actually have a life, so here are a few selections of music that occupy a place in my heart.

1. My current favourite video and it’s not because it features my beautiful and talented daughter, Sarah Carter. This is SanguinDrake, My Reflection. I’m just a little bit proud. David and Sarah’s new album is launched!

2. Current favorite workout song: Adele is doing it for me these days. I hear the opening line, “there’s a fire starting in my heart”, and I’m set for all 12 reps. The thumping bass drum gives me that all important shot of adrenalin on my final set of curls.

3.  Favorite Big Story song, for those days when my soul needs a good stretch; My Soul by Peter Mayer.

4. Favorite song when I feel like indulging sadness. I’m pretty sure that one day it’s going to break my heart wide open once and for all. A guy can hope. Just never get tired of it. Sarah Mclachlin’s cover of Joni Mitchell’s River.

5. For comic relief, my favorite song to dance to when I was 21 (in Bruce Wasylik’s basement because he had the best Marantz amp and these wicked wall speakers). We’d drink rum and coke, and get down. Wild Cherry, Play That Funky Music. Also happened to have the sexiest album cover ever. My hair was a little bit like the drummer’s.

6. Last, but not least, my favorite song-that-I’d-like-to-listen-to-with-Richard Dawkins by my hero, and Canadian treasure, Bruce Cockburn going solo on Mystery. The guitar is so exquisitely simple and elegant (but not easy). His songwriting is always profound.

What is your instinctive response to this image of the church? If you lived in Vancouver, chances are that it wouldn’t be positive. Which makes what happened this past Sunday quite remarkable. Eight wonderful souls decided to join our congregation. Five were by reaffirmation of baptismal vows, three were by adult baptism, and one was by transfer of faith. I mention this because there was a time, not so long ago, when virtually all new members would be by transfer. Adult baptisms would come along once in a blue moon.  I sense a shift in the land, a sign, and a welcome one, signifying that the culture of Christendom has been defeated by modernist secularism. It’s a relief to know that those who are joining the church are doing so consciously and after very careful consideration.

When I say “joined the church”, I need to be a bit careful. Of the eight, only two were doing so because of any kind of denominational loyalty or affiliation. This, too, is new. In fact, most who attend membership classes these days are surprised to hear that they are joining the larger church. They are not interested in “The United Church of Canada.”  Period. They are joining this congregation. I suspect that this is a trend that is already well established. Denominationalism is over. These people want to know what this particular group of people is up to and if they like it, they’ll jump in. Central funds like The Mission and Service Fund of the United Church of Canada are going to be in serious trouble if they expect these new people to pony up. As these central funds dwindle, we can expect ever more desperate efforts from national bodies to promote them. But the writing is on the wall, for good or ill.

Which is to say, institutional loyalty is pretty much gone on the west coast of Canada. There’s no point fighting it. “Church” and “Christian” are dirty words in Vancouver. I should qualify. For anybody functioning from a modernist and post-modernist worldview, they are dirty words. It’s just too difficult to get beyond associations with fundamentalism, biblical literalism, and how in an era of colonialism, the church too often carried out the imperial agenda. I’m serious about starting a group in the fall called
“Hurt By Church?” Every time I run a membership class, the conversation quickly turns to negative experiences of church. Two of the three women who were baptized took literally years to make their decision to join. The interesting thing is that increasingly people are showing up at Canadian Memorial who have transcended the post-modernist suspicion of “religion” and “the Bible”, and are able to articulate their need to go deep within a religious tradition. This is a small, but growing, demographic. In fact, I suspect that this will increasingly be the niche we serve.

An increasingly common question that comes up in these classes is “If I join the church, does it mean that I necessarily have to call myself a Christian?” This label sticks in the craw. We have atheists, Buddhists, secular humanists, actively participating in our congregation, (and contributing financially) and who want to be voting members, but currently there is no way to attain this status without a confession of faith. How are we going to deal with this as a church?

All eight new members were women. This is another trend. I don’t know what’s happening to men in our culture. It’s true that we have deeply spiritual and committed men, but increasingly church is a culture of women. Men function, in fact, to draw our best, single, women away from the church. Occasionally it works the other way, where they will drag their men to church, but the norm is that our brightest and best quietly disappear. These days, my first assumption when this happens is that they’ve found a man—a man who is not the least bit interested in “church”.

Finally, I learned that these people are interested in theology. Of course, theology goes hand in hand with community, spiritual practice, compassionate service, etc. But each of these people are particularly interested in a coherent and relevant theology that helps them to make sense of their lives and the world. It is rather unique for a congregation to have theology and practice as their core mission. Canadian Memorial’s core purpose is to “teach and practice evolutionary Christian spirituality”. While this is just one theology among many, it does have the advantage of regarding science as public, evidence-based, revelation. I think that we’ve soft-pedaled theology for the last few decades, but that there is a real appetite for it among those who are showing up, not because it’s the thing to do, but rather in spite of the fact that it’s most decidedly not the thing to do.

I’m looking forward this fall to launching the curriculum for our Learning Institute for Evolutionary Christianity (tentative name). I’ll be letting you know more about this in future blogs.

Dr. Daniel Siegel assures us that there is no such animal as immaculate perception. But there are evidenced-based practices that can move us in the right direction. While away in Tofino, B.C. for a few days of beach walking, Ann and I have been working our way through his book, The Mindful Therapist. Dr. Siegel is an MD, (pediatrician and psychiatrist), who has spent a lot of time doing brain research. Here’s a two minute video where he offers a simple model of how the brain works.

One of the things I respect about him is that he’s not afraid, as a scientist, to distinguish between the mind and the brain. (He points out that in his research, 85% of teachers and clinicians of various therapeutic modalities don’t even bother to define “mind”—in fact, the majority simply reduce the mind to the brain.

For the record, here is his definition: “The mind is an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information…an important function of the mind is the regulatory process, with two essential aspects: monitoring and modifying”. A critical implication of this definition that when it comes to the mind and the brain, we’re dealing with two-way traffic. It’s an important corrective to the position of Cordelia Fine in her entertaining book, A Mind of Its Own, which I wrote about in an earlier post. Siegel’s research highlights the importance of doing all that we can to strengthen the mind so that it can be in the driver’s seat, and put the marvelous instrument that is our brain to work for us.

The mind monitors the massive flow of energy and information that is the sea we swim in. This field of energy/information shows up in/as and through relationships (with people and with nature) and our own bodies. The includes our five senses, and also what he calls the sixth sense—what he calls “interoception”—our gut feelings (or intuition) about something. Importantly, we are able to choose how we interpret these signals and what we want our brains to do with them. This constitutes the modifying aspect of his definition. If we don’t consciously strengthen our minds, however, it’s more likely that our brains will in fact swing us around by the tail.

He presents a worldview that is comprised of three fundamental realms: the field of infinite possibility; the plane of probability; and the peak of activation. If we are not dipping into the field of infinite possibility (which he calls “presence” or mindfulness), we are limited by probability templates that we formed in the past, so that what eventually manifests in thought, feeling, attitude, or behavior (peak of activation) will be old beans warmed up at best.

(For all of you theologians, I found myself thinking about these three realms in Trinitarian language: the Father/Mother as the field of infinite possibility; the Spirit as the plane of probability; and the Son/Christ as the peak of activation or incarnation.) Siegel is not predisposed to such metaphysical meanderings, but I would say that he does have deeply spiritual instincts.

The practices involve learning to rest regularly in the field of infinite possibility. We do this by practicing the skill and competency of mindfulness (or “Mindsight”). I’ll write more about this in a future blog, but for now I’ll just say how grateful I am to find somebody who grounds his research and take on the world in hard science using the language of correlation between brain and mind, rather than reducing mind to the brain. Even if we’ll never achieve immaculate perception, his research and rigorous practice techniques, can help at least to apply some vinegar and water to the windows through which we see our worlds.

Here Siegel talks about the relationship between “triangle of well-being: the mind, brain, and relationships.

I was once asked to write a piece describing evolutionary theology in six hundred words or less. I know, it’s ridiculous. But I gave it a shot anyway. Actually, I’ve expanded it a bit because it’s my blog.

In the song Lord of the Starfields Bruce Cockburn’s praises his God: “O Love that fires the sun, keep me burning”.

After 13.7 billion years, the love that fired the universe into being is still firing through an evolutionary process infused by the radiance of the divine. It’s all an incarnation of love, everything, you, me, a tadpole, the crow building her nest in my magnolia this morning. It’s love in the process of realization. Christians have tended to associated Jesus with “the” incarnation, but I’ve come to think of the story of his life, death, and resurrection most radiant occasion of a universal incarnational dynamic in the human realm. He is the divine promise of where all creation is headed. In Teilhard de Chardin’s words, the universe is in the process of being christified, just like Jesus.

There was a time when I imagined myself over here looking out upon the universe outside of me. This objective relationship to the cosmos is emphasized by science. A beautiful thing. But the universe also enjoys an interior dimension, a subjectivity. That is you, dear reader. And me. And it is the “we” that arises in the sweet space between us, if we decide to fall in love with each other. You are, we are, iterations of this originating fire—the fire of love. Your big self is as big as this universe, inside and out, and you are eternally expanding. We are the presence of the universe doing the looking.

God is the womb of creativity, intelligence, and love that we emerge out of along with everything. This emergence is happening every moment. To know this is to awaken to our deep creativity, intelligence, and love, being made as we are in the image of God. Check out this video, if you want to see how these three qualities manifest in artistic expression. The artist illustrates beautifully this stepping into this stream of creativity. A more profound three minute theology I have not found.

Divine creativity is expressed primarily in, through, and as the evolutionary history of the universe, (able now to consciously enjoy the creative process in, through, and as us). The evolving cosmos, including life on our planet—both bodies and minds—is the incarnation of God’s deep creative desire for love to find its fullest expression. The story of evolution, then, is itself a sacred text, revealing God’s heart and intention. This implies a non-coercive bias in the evolutionary trajectory of the cosmos – toward an increase in love.

My core spiritual practice as a Christian is to remember this when I find myself contracting into a pathetically small self that generates all kinds of stories that have nothing to do with love. I remember, in prayer, worship, on walks with my wife and friends, writing sermons, etc. And lately I find that placing my hand over my heart helps my memory, which looks kind of strange when standing in a check-out line with a cart full of groceries. I remember that I am an expression of the love that fired the sun, and my silent prayer is to keep burning in me until I take my last breath.

To be a disciple of Christ is to undergo a fundamental identity shift, by awakening to the simple and obvious truth that we are occasions of the divine creativity and love coursing through the cosmos commissioned with the purpose of birthing the “new thing” God is doing. Anointed and called to be the new thing that is eternally springing forth from the heart of God, we proclaim and enact the Kin-dom of God.

“I said I’d be your lover

You laughed at what I said

I lost my job forever

I was counted with the dead”

(You Have Loved Enough—Leonard Cohen)

In most pursuits—sports, writing, preaching, cutting out sugar, keeping my body in decent condition—I can count on discipline to come through for me. I have a finally honed and heeled will. Once I put my mind to something, and truly make a decision, I usually “succeed” in accomplishing what I set out to do. That’s not an entirely bad thing. It has served me well.

But when it comes to love, willpower doesn’t seem to cut it. I can’t will my heart to open. I can’t will myself to not get triggered when my wife says something that bugs the hell out of me. I can’t will myself to love the taxi driver who seems oblivious that he shares the road with other human beings. I can’t control the adrenaline that kicks in when I see a fight break out in hockey. (And until recently I wasn’t able to muster the willpower just to stop watching these barbaric displays of male testosterone).

It wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that I feel this profound sense that love is actually what my life is for. It’s all I want. It’s what I showed up for.  And truthfully, I’ve always known this. Which is why I was sitting on the edge of my bed today feeling (yet once more) desperate. I CAN”T DO IT, I heard myself saying. And I realized that this is probably the whole point of the exercise.It’s my personal thorn-in-the-side. I’ve finally found the one thing that “I” actually can’t do, can’t make better, and can’t conquer. Sitting there with my face pathetically in my hands, I heard the words again, ” I can’t do it”. I’m meant to fail. It helps me understand what Fred Buechner meant by the title of one of his books—a reflection on the theology of the cross—The Magnificent Defeat.

I sat there, and looked around for a white flag. The best I could come up with was my sweaty underwear (post workout). I friggin’ give up, once and for all. No more strategies. No more books. No more anguished self-reflection. No more behaviour modification. No more believing that if only other people would change.  Been there. Done that. G_d, Holy Spirit, brother Jesus, heavenly hosts of angels, Whomsoever has this portfolio, I surrender.

I swept the marble chambers,
But you sent me down below
You kept me from believing
Until you let me know:

That I am not the one who loves
It’s love that seizes me
When hatred with his package comes,
You forbid delivery

And when the hunger for your touch
Rises from the hunger,
You whisper, “you have loved enough,
Now let me be the lover”

The longest journey (for a man at least) is to one’s knees.  The personality (ego) is a hodgepodge of biologically and culturally mediated impulses and concerns. The male personality is evolutionarily wired for battle, and after 200,000 years forged on the battlefields of life, my brain is wired to see the world  through the eyes and heart of Attila the Hun. Only a fool could imagine that this “I” could, by force of will, take on these impulses and win. I have tried enough to love and failed magnificently. I pray for the grace to step aside, and by the power of all that is not me, let the Lover take over.

Recently, I heard biologist, Elisabet Sahtouris, offer a great analogy that helps me to interpret the Easter story. Noting that physicists talk about sound vibrations at various frequencies as constitutive of the universe, she employs the image of a cosmic keyboard. Science deals with the low and mid-range frequencies, matter and electro-magnetic energy. Religion plays on the higher part of the keyboard in the realm of Spirit. Spiritual folk tend to make sense of the world by starting at the top end and working their way down, while scientists tend to start at the low-end and work their way up. But for decades science and religion got stuck, playing only one part of the keyboard and making the claim that only the music that came from their part of the keyboard was legitimate. To dance well and sing on key, we need to hear the music of the the whole keyboard.

But the “key” point is that there is only one cosmic keyboard. Nature is One. Reality is a single-story universe of infinite depth and height. The Easter story is not the story of a supernatural God, who intervened in Jerusalem 2000 years, suspending the laws of nature with a supernatural miracle.  Rather, it is a story that encapsulates and catalyzes the story of a resurrection impulse that is active at all levels of creation, cosmological, biological, social and spiritual. Science is particularly focused on the first three. The spiritual frequency is a dimension of Nature/Reality that eludes easy measurement. If you intend to hear it, you need to spend time training the ear of your heart.

G_d is the One, Encompassing, Enfolding, Inhabiting Heart, Mind, and Will out of whom this wild diversity of creation is born, and is in the process of Real-izing, that is making real. The miracle is not so much “the” resurrection, but rather this resurrection or Easter impulse that is irrepressibly rising up and transcending existing forms in an erotic yearning for this realization. Here’s my Prayer of Opening for our Easter service.

Easter God,

persuade us that Easter

is not a once-upon-a-time story,

but rather a moment by moment leaning into,

a deep trust,

that your name and nature

is Resurrection.

This rising up

from the dead,

of life from matter,

and mind from life,

and a promised future

where we see nothing

but dead-ends and a darkened tomb,

is your M.O.

This is the only miracle,

that you are always rising up

in willing hearts and souls,

unafraid to hope,

and to be hope,

for a world entranced

by despair.

Amen.

Did Jesus rise up from the dead? I just finished Autobiography of a Yogi, considered by many to be a spiritual classic. ParamahansaYogananda was a 20th century enlightened master. I was intrigued by how relatively common (in the vibrational frequency that he inhabits) is resurrection, of gurus, in the flesh, returning to their disciples in order to facilitate their liberation and help them in their mission. He loves Jesus, and considers him to be an enlightened master. In his worldview, the enlightened ones are able to materialize and dematerialize at will.

It’s an interesting story, as is the Easter story. Do I believe that an iPhone camera pointed at Jesus on Easter morning would have captured him rising up? I’ll answer it with a line from poet, Mary Oliver: “There are many stories more beautiful than answers”. With Thomas, until I actually experience such a thing for myself, I remain agnostic. But what I do know is that the story is beautiful, and that it both encapsulates and catalyzes an experience that I do know about. This Easter impulse is the most real, most natural, most miraculous dynamic that I have known, and that when I say “yes” to this sacred, irrepressible urge to fashion from my life a future that is a blessing to our one, Earth community, I know that Christ lives.