Ascension to you

On April 12, 1961 Soviet spaceman Yuri Gagarin was the first man to enter outer space and orbit earth. It was claimed he said; “I don’t see God up here.” Later it was claimed Russian leader Khrushchev had said “Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see God up there.”

Whichever it was, both misunderstand. Too often we speak and even live as if God and heaven is “up there” and “out there” not within and among us, which is what Christ came to show. If Gagarin had flown higher would he have seen God? No. John 1;18 says say no-one has ever seen God. 

So, a literal reading of the ascension might leave us looking up as they did in Acts 1;10, which says “Men of Galilee, why do you stand here looking into the sky?” I don’t think anyone is waiting for an answer. The question suggests there is somewhere else to look, God in all things. 
 
If we think of heaven as a place, we do not have to be responsible for our own greatness. We are left with a gap between us and God, spirit and matter, heaven and earth.  Rather than looking up, ascension tells us to find Christ everywhere within by being present. 

In the 2018 film Christopher Robin Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin stand on a bridge chatting. Christopher Robin asks Pooh what he loves doing best. “Going to see you,” he replies. Christopher agrees but then says, “What I like doing best is nothing.” “Doing nothing often leads to the very best of something,” Pooh responds. They walk on to sit under a tree. 

Christopher Robin is growing up, and it’s soon time for him to go off to school. “I’m not going to do nothing anymore,” he tells Pooh. “Never?” Pooh asks. “Well, they don’t let you at the boarding school.” This sets up the story of a grown-up who has forgotten how to just be free. Christopher is focused on his work at a suitcase manufacturer, anxiously drilling a philosophy of achievement into his daughter as his boss does to him, reminding him “nothing comes from nothing,” the opposite of Pooh’s first statement on the bridge.
 
But if Christ, the mind and spirit who filled Jesus, has ascended to fill the whole creation, the greatest presence comes from nothing. Genesis portrays the uncreated God as creating the cosmos out of nothing. We are born in God too, the uncaused is an aspect of our being. Genesis says God created humankind in his image, so we are one with God. When we want what God wants, to manifest a communion of Love everywhere, we become like God too, so our work is to accept ourselves as images of God not separations from God.  So Jesus has not left us, he left us his mind. 

Let this mind be in you, which was in Christ Jesus says Philippians 2:5. Christ is all in all, says Colossians 3:11! The ascension is not our removal from earth but our liberation from time & space. But we live in a world in which up is portrayed as better up than down. Singers want to be at the top of the charts, athletes want to be on top of their game, students want to be at the top of the class. We would have an up day, not a down day. So something within us knows that we are more than earthbound creatures. 

Getting high not feeling low is not a comparison, a competition, or a judgment, it is not comparing our lives with other peoples, thinking that for us to ascend the other has to descend, but knowing, “the fullness who fills all in all.” Christ’s fulness is realised not by reaching up and grasping but by noticing what pulls us down and releasing it. 

That might be fear, desire, anger, sadness, resentment, a need to be right, jealous, proud, a perfectionist, an addict.  1 John 4 says whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not, does not. If this is so, there is nowhere to go, nothing to do but respond to the greatness we are in Christ. 
 
There is a story about a bird and a man who use a tree to escape a flood.  The bird stands for the creature in Christ, the man for someone relying only on his body mind and intellect, and the tree stands for the world, and the flood, for the heavy feelings that drown us, so we need to get above them. The bird and the man sit on the branch above them, above the flood, but the bird, the creature in Christ, knows that if it snaps, he will fly, while the man relying only on his own body mind and intellect knows, if it snaps, he will drown. They are both fully in this world, only the spiritual one knows he can rise above its weight.

So, as you begin to look at your life and honestly identify the places of gravity that prevent your experience of rising to heaven while on earth, know that the very things that hold you down point the way to your ascension. Our participation begins by seeing what it is we need to let go of to be able to be free, and no longer to be bound by our little body, mind and intellect. We are in it, not of it, we are risen and ascended, because the uncreated is inside us all.

FSHS +

Who has freewill?

In this interview, given me by Consultant Psychiatrist Dr Peter Fenwick, he questions Contemplative Rupert Spira, who describes Jesus’ kind of consciousness, cosmic consiousness. This isn't thinking, but the intimate awareness in which all thought feeling sensation and matter arises. The universe is made of this awareness so we could call this God, but it is as secular as it is religious. So go slowly with this one, it takes some considerable reflection........................

The contents of human consciousness have had a long evolution, so examination of the source of our personality, or therapy, is necessary. But we also need to be at one with the source of the universe.  Our personal awareness is too shallow for cosmic consciousness, which is to know our true nature is infinite, the divine from which finite fear desire and memory is made (2 Peter 1;4). 

If we only avoid the unpleasant and seek the pleasant, we are attached to fear and desire. Fear is desire to escape, rather than embrace all bodily experiences as temporary. In this insight Rupert “does not know a world out there,” just like Jesus who has “overcome the world.” (John 16;33). As Rupert says, “Awareness has no objective qualities.” Rupert “cannot separate himself as the aware knowing presence from perception,” like Jesus who said “the light of the body is the eye, and if your eye is single, your whole body is full of light.” This means the way we see is what we see, so Christian Desert Father and Mothers taught watchfulness of all thoughts and sensations, and more recently Quantum Physics suggests observation alters the physical world.

To this end Rupert says his experience of the world is “current perception,” like Jesus’ teaching not to be concerned with tomorrow but to let tomorrow be concerned with itself, or what we might call a psychological flow state, but one that can embrace fear and desire and know the spiritual. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” as the King James says (Matt 6;34). 

Jesus taught; “lose your life to find it” (Matt 16;25) and your “left hand not knowing what the right is doing” (Matt 6;3).  This egoless source of body/mind personality is a non-dual ground in which “my father sends rain on the good and evil” (Matt 5;45), or you "love your neighbour as yourself" (Mark 12;31) because your neighbour is yourself.  Rupert says; “There is no separate you to be advantaged, no choosing entity, thoughts just arise unbidden like the weather, and the same power that lifted my hand asked the question about who lifted it.” When Rupert talks of ego-less-ness, and of his teacher of ego-less-ness, Rupert's teacher is not Jesus, but a teacher of Advaita, or philosophical monism.  Nevertheless, Jesus teaches union of the soul with God. 

In the gospels, ‘Rabbouni’ is his name and his teaching is Contemplation, knowing you are a spiritual being having a human experience, that this life is in Eternal life, one-ness with all, a quality like birds and flowers who don’t toil, disciples who rejoice in insults, blessed by grief, light of the world, or, consciousness.  Biblically speaking, I am is the name of God. Rupert says “I am not a person, nor are you and nor is anybody, I am the awareness in which thoughts sensations and perceptions arise,” and this transpersonal awareness features throughout John’s gospel. It is “I am the vine and you are the branches” (John 15;5), and in the opening of Colossians, Ephesians, and 1 John, which say the whole universe is in ‘Christ’, the wisdom embodied in Jesus.

It’s for us temporary body/minds to know this living wisdom, despite apparent blocks caused by attachment to desire and self image. Jesus said; “I and my father are one, may they be one in us,” (John 17;21). When Rupert says; “The world as experienced is made out of our own being,” this is the one “in whom we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17;28) This means you are birthless and deathless. “The bus the body and room are real as consciousness, not as matter or mind,” which produce fear and desire.  The time to realise this is now.  As Rupert says “eternity is ever present.” Jesus said “the Kingdom is at hand” (Matt 3;2) “the time is come” (John 4;23).

Desiring happiness is unhappiness

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” says Jesus in Monty Python’s film Life of Brian. Someone in the crowd says; “Cheesemakers? What’s so special about them?” Then someone else replies; “No, he must mean anyone working in the dairy industry.”

A modern-day sermon on happiness would sound more like; “Blessed are you with loads of stuff, the sexy, healthy, respected, popular, productive, growing richer.”

But all this just puts conditions on happiness, and God forbid it would mention God either, while Jesus’ teaching on real happiness, the beatitudes’, the blessedness-es, which Luke, focused on humility, calls sermon on the plain, and Matthew, focused on Moses, calls sermon on the mount,is about our unconditional happiness.

For this, you have to stop wanting anything less than the I am who never changes throughout all the conditions of our lives, the I am who is always here, the I am covered up by the conditions of the world, the body, and the mind, and give up, turn back, repent, surrender all, rest, in One I am.

If I confuse who I really am with I am 32, or I am 54, or I am 76, I am well thought of, or I am tired, I am searching, I am loved, I am lonely, I am scared, I am in an intimate relationship, I am in a special state of mind, I am feeling a substance in the body, all this is to mistake who I am for a passing state, a changing, and a forever fading away. Happiness peace and fulfilment are nothing to do with these.

Jesus said; “Blessed are you who are hungry now, you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, you will laugh,” because he is telling you to dis-identify with changes, and everything changes, it really does, even gender changes nowadays.

I heard Lord Chartres, former Bishop of London explain how at London School of Economics he heard someone advertise what sounded like G&T’S, and thought he would get Gin and Tonic, only to find the adverts for GNT’s, gender neutral toilets.

Jesus’ I am statements, like I am the bread of life, the true vine, the good shepherd, the way the truth and the life, mean I am is unconditional happiness. The prodigal Son admitted defeat and came home from the world body and mind back to the source from which they came, which is religion.  He gave up searching for conditional happiness to submit to our Father, or as one 14^th century mystic once put it; “I travelled so far in seeking God, but it was only when I gave up, and turned back, that I found out there he was, present, in me.” This is awareness.

The Sea of Galilee, where Jesus taught the beatitudes, is a very large still lake in a peaceful fertile place, like our conscious awareness is. Our thoughts are like ripples on the surface, our feelings like currents in the water, but we are not these because a wave cannot find peace and fulfilment in another wave, or a different part of the ocean of consciousness, it must give up and sink into itself, the depth of the ocean where there is no motion, mind and heart silent, still, and we cannot learn this new understanding unless we are humble, so Jesus said; “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” Pride doesn’t do it-humility might.

Jesus also said; “Blessed are you when people hate you, exclude you, revile you, defame you on account of the Son of Man, rejoice and leap for joy, surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets." There is a modern prophet in 16 year old Greta Thunberg, inspiring school strikes for climate change. She said at the UN; You speak of economic growth because you are too sacred of being unpopular. I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet. 200 species a day and our civilisation being sacrificed for a very small number of people to make enormous amounts of money. 

A truly religious man or woman does not rely on approval or react to criticism, reputation isn’t who they are, and only they can turn off their light, but people to whom God isn’t central cannot see this, and they will lash out harder if you turn ever more intensely to God as your source, which is a test, but there is a story about a monk who slept outside with a stone for a pillow and was criticised for needing a pillow at all.  He threw it away and used the earth, then he was mocked for throwing it away just because someone criticised him. So the monk decided to please God alone, not other people’s perceptions of him, and found heaven in his heart and the whole universe. The saint overcomes the tribulations of the world.

I hardly dare say it, even in torture, Jesus said Father forgive them, they know not what they do. The Aramaic Idiom he used when he said blessed are those persecuted for the sake of righteousness means deeply and firmly happy are those in whom the urgent desire for justice and salvation is so strong they cannot sleep at night.  This righteousness such beings are filled with is saving union with God, in a Biblical context, absolute, goodness with no opposite, no form, no limit. Such longing for God is like being in a lake with someone holding your head under water until you gasp for air; the kind of intensity of longing which leads us to realise God by giving up our search. Incidentally this is exactly what John the Baptist did to people, in the Jordan, in the days before the health and safety executive and personal liability insurance, so maybe he was John the Drowner, and he lost a few.  But the others got a near death experience out of it...

So Jesus also said; “Blessed are those who mourn, they will be comforted.” One who mourns loss or loneliness indicates a deep sense of emptiness that can only be filled with One true Self not confined to anybody, to any thought, or to any world. A consciousness in whom all our smaller consciousnesses partake.

Jesus said; “Blessed are the meek, they will inherit the earth.” He didn't mean be a doormat but that the gentle have earth for a heritage because they overcome the delusion of ever being able to possess it, they are free from an idea that anything really belongs to anyone.  Like two aborigines who know arguing over who owns the earth is like two fleas on a dog's back arguing over who owns the dog.  In self surrender, maybe with possessions but not with possessiveness, they lose a sense of ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ God’s servants, entirely dependent, but strangely happy, finding they gain everything in the truest sense.

Jesus said; “Blessed are the merciful, they will be shown mercy.” To find God, be God-like in mercy even for those who are harsh and unhappy. Humans remember hurt, the sin persists in their eyes, but not in God’s.  Mercy is the fruit of an inner calm in which one is an empath who feels and shares joy and sorrow of all beings.

Jesus said; “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” To know who you are, desire and fear must dissolve, pain and pleasure, passion and craving must pass, as St Paul says; “be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” This process purifies, simplifies, calms the mind to attend to God’s purity, your nature.

Finally, Jesus said: “Blessed are the peacemakers, they will be called children of God.” His Aramaic idiom makes it more like; “firmly and deeply joyful are the peacemakers,” because a peacemaker does not worship his own human ideas, brainwashing him or herself with a text, but understands different body minds illuminated by One God.

Jesus was a Jew, a teacher, a Rabbi, they called him Rabbouni and he taught them contemplation. In the Jerusalem Talmud, the central text of Judaism, the Rabbis say that every sacred text is written in black fire on white fire, the black fire is the diverse tracing of all our thoughts, and the divine white is the silent inscape of present and immediate experience, an ecstatic reflection of existential reality, the mystical understanding of a faith, any faith, which is trust.

To be happy then stop desiring happiness, which is unhappiness. Let go, let be, accept what is, deconstruct conditions, know we are One being in different conditions, just like Father, Son and Holy Spirit +

Luke 4.14-21 LOOK WHERE YOU CANNOT SEE

‘There is a story about a drunk man searching for his keys under a lamp-post despite losing them inside his house. “Why are you looking for them here?” he is asked. “Because there is much more light here than in my house,” the drunk man replies. 

The point is that we tend to seek where it is easy rather than where we lose the inner light of God, in the difficulties, where our attention is captured, where we feel uneasy, uncomfortable, isolated or separated.

So my apologies to anyone who has already heard this story about three forgetful friends playing bridge.

One of them suddenly says, “Sometimes I catch myself with a jar of mayonnaise in my hand in front of the refrigerator and I really just can’t remember whether I need to put it away or make a sandwich.”

A second friend agrees, saying he often pauses, befuddled, on the stairway, unsure of whether he was going up it or down it, and why.

The third friend, a recent widower, says; “Oh no, not me, I don’t have anything like those problems at all; and a very good job too, knock on wood (and then he does)….. Oh! There’s the door, whose going to get it?”

Most of us are like this, we don’t even know our attention is habitually lost so we are asking the wrong questions. I have not done a Eucharist for four years without spending one hour in silence first because when you do not know how to be present, you cannot access the Presence who is real, so lost are you in the transitory mind and emotions....
 

....and there was the man whose memory was so bad that when he awoke, he couldn’t remember where he had put his clothes the night before. He was so worried about finding his things on waking up, that he couldn’t fall asleep.

One evening, taking pencil and paper, he wrote down where he had placed each item of clothing. Placing his notes by his bed, he fell asleep, confident he would find it in the morning. And he did. He woke up, took the notes and read: 'pants—on chair back; and there they were. He put them on. ‘shirt—on bed post;' and there it was. He put it on. 'hat—on desk'; and there it sat. He placed it on his head. In a few minutes he was completely dressed, but then… a great dread came upon him once again.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said aloud. ‘Here are my pants, my shirt, and my cap; but where am I?’ He looked and looked and looked, but now he couldn’t find himself, and that’s how it is with most of us us too. Only when you are present, will you be able to stop identifying with problems and know Presence.

It is that simple and that difficult, and too much religion encourages you to be unconscious, absent, and search for your keys where it is easy rather than in the dark where you will need the inner light of God who really is. God respects you too much for this, which is why “Today” is the first word of Jesus’ public teaching. “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:21) And the last words he spoke to his apostles, in the Garden of Gethsemane were these... “Stay awake.” (Matt 26:38) Today, stake awake.

Think about it: where am I? Where are you? I’m standing here! And you’re sitting there, of course! It’s obvious. Or is it really obvious? At some point, especially if I keep droning on long enough, you may look at your watch and say ‘What time is it? When does this end anyway? I wonder what there will be to eat later on?’ And if you can catch yourself at that very moment, then where are you? Are you still here? Or have you been lost? Suddenly looked at your watch and left this moment in favour of some other?

Similarly, you could be sitting here listening to me, and suddenly remember that you forgot to return an important email, or you could remember a fight you had with a family member. Again, are you really here, or are you now lost? In either case, have you actually left the chair? Physically, of course not. But in every other sense—you have left. You’re gone. You’re missing this moment, the only moment that’s really happening! And that is why being present to God where we lost God is important, which is the great task of religion, to keep you fully awake, alert, and conscious. Then you know what you need to know in your context.

The reason atheism and agnosticism are so common is that we no longer teach people how to be present, to stay awake, in the places they lose the ability to do this, which are usually the places it hurts.  Nowadays we educate distract or entertain the mind or emotions, we very rarely drop into the heart and just be in the body.  Presence is a full-body experience, not an idea in the mind. The mind we identify with can only reprocess the past, judge the present, and worry about the future.  With one foot in the past and one in the future we completely miss the point, which is the presence in whom we live and move and have our Being (Acts 17;28) and knowing that thou art that, the source of body and mind and creation.  

Instead, we become blind to who is, captive to what was, oppressed by what might be, unavailable to those we love, to the needs of the world, and absent to our Self. That is not the life to which Jesus calls us. The freedom to be and become fully alive, fully human, fully Christlike, can only happen here and now, in embodied compassion in the present moment, because Jesus neither reminisces about the past nor forecasts the future. “Filled with the power of the spirit” and “anointed to bring good news to the poor,” he comes “to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour,” and we are the poor, captive, blind, oppressed, those seeking favour.

In the midst of our inability to pay attention, our poverty of love, hope, or meaning, our emotional and spiritual blindness, it is easy to run away, get stuck in the past, fixate on the future, but Jesus comes today, here, now, embodied, not lost in our past or hidden in an unknown future. The only place we meet God is here and now.  Today is when God brings good news to the poor, proclaims release to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, frees the oppressed, and proclaims the year of the Lord’s favour. Only presence of Christ today can heal our past or prepare our future.

This is made real to the extent we admit powerlessness to stop resisting, or fighting our addictions to thoughts, things, behaviours, and just say Welcome, welcome, welcome. I welcome everything that comes to me today because I know it’s for my healing. I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations, and conditions. I let go of desire for power and control. I let go of desire for affection, esteem, approval, pleasure. I let go of desire for survival and security. I let go of desire to change any situation, condition, person, or myself. I open to the love and presence of God and God’s action right within and beyond this body.

Which brings us to politics. When I say politics I am not talking about the unending nightmare of Brexit but the challenges of living in community or relationship. The opinions we hold, the decisions we make, can only be right when we are present and the mind surrenders to the heart in openness and receptivity, embodied, boundaryless. 

Jesus’ political identity begins not with his individuality, role, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nation, party loyalty, or tribe, but with baptism. “You are the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” From knowing he is the Beloved, Jesus is led by the Spirit in the wilderness where he overcomes the corrupters of politics: materialism, power, narrowing self-interest. Empowered, he worships and teaches in synagogues where he grew, to people who know him, and reads this from the Prophet: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

Those words describe the politics of Jesus. Good news to the poor, release to the captive, sight to the blind, letting the oppressed go, declaring God’s favour. They are not campaign promises for the future but a present reality. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled.” From here on everything he does is grounded in a politics of release, sight, freedom, divine favour, healing the sick, casting out demons, forgiving sins, feeding the hungry, raising the dead, being open to pain, suffering, rejection, to death resurrection and ascension, which is why we are all here, and could apply to us too.   

At the heart of Jesus’ politics is an unspoken ever-present question to us: Where does it hurt? Because; “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” (Matt 9;12) So where does it hurt? Where do you keep losing attention? Where do you become obsessed? You only find God if you look for God where you lost and lose God. 

Jesus’ political agenda is not determined or influenced by who is good or bad, insider or outsider, it is the politics of presence. Where are you poor? Good news to you. Where are you captive? Release for you. Where are you blind? Sight to you. Where are you oppressed? Go in freedom. Divine favour is not given to the poor, captive, blind, or oppressed because they are good or righteous, but because God is good and righteous, and they are now open to God’s presence, rather than trying to avoid it.

I could quote so many scriptures about stillness silence and presence we would be here for hours, so instead just let me ask you this. Are you open to this presence, or lost in personal politics? Are you aware the scriptures are encouraging you to be present and vulnerable to God as your true Being, your inner light, not lost in the personal issues? Are you present to God, or thinking? If you are really here, sensitive, embodied, present, in the sacrament of this present moment, you will notice that all boldily sensations are transient, continually passing away. That is why St Paul said “Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Rom 7:24-25).

With Jesus as our teacher we are awake to fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal (2 Cor 4:18).  We look for the keys where we lost them, using the light within.   

We stay present, to what is eternal inside, and this is a release.  The past is history, the future a mystery, but the eternal in our bodies is a gift. That word gift is why the present in called present, and only the present is here.

FSHS +

They have no wine?

At the end of a busy day, a man and a woman are sitting on the veranda in the quiet twilight, broken only by the sounds of gentle wind, and swash of the waves.

They are enjoying a glass of wine together. As the sun slowly sinks below the mountains, the woman breaks the soothing silence to suddenly say, “I love you so much I don’t know I could ever live without you.”

Completely surprised at this, the man asks her, “Is that you or the wine talking?” But she explains that she was actually talking to her glass of wine, and not to him.

Despite such personal disappointments, there is someone closer than a person could ever be, someone impersonal, someone intimately within and quite beyond our experience, and someone we literally cannot live without. It takes brokenness to become intimate with this real being in relationship before you die. Nothing, an 18th century Jewish mystic said, is as whole as a broken heart. And it was the 21st century singer Leonard Cohen who said “There is a crack in everything, and that is how the light gets in.”  So  if you really want to be whole, get a feel for your brokenness.

When Mary says to Jesus at the wedding at Cana (John 2 1-12) “They have no wine,” she speaks a truth about persons who believe they are separate from the divine.

If we believe we are a separated body/mind, we resist marriage to God. And then the wine gives out. The glass is empty. The party over. Life seems dry. The day wears on, we become increasingly aware we cannot replenish the wine with our separate resources. Despite our best efforts, our good intentions, our hard work, the wine of our own life is always giving out. This is the truth. We refill our glass, it becomes empty. There isn’t enough. We may live, but we will be less than fully alive, unaware of our true nature. We will, as Mary tells Jesus, “have no wine”. And that's OK.

As separated beings we cannot be recipients of a full life and we might even resent the creator. If we believe in the self-sufficiency of being a separate body mind there will be no vibrancy or vitality, nothing grows or ferments, the bouquet of life is colourless, tasteless. The failure of our belief in our own power might seem like a disaster, an embarrassment, or a failure, as it did for the bride and groom at the Canan wedding, but it will confront us with truth old as creation, new as eternity, open to the eternal.

It may come on the day of a diagnosis, the death of a loved one, the loss of a friendship or marriage. It might be a search for love and acceptance, thirst for meaning and significance, guilt, disappointment, regret, fear, failure, self-doubt, depression, longing for something we can’t name, or unanswered prayer that brings it. But really, every single moment we ever resist is all our ‘having no wine’. 

Because we come to the wedding at Cana every single day, none of us guests or spectators, all of us participants, ready for union, intimacy and wholeness, our marriage to God.

As Jesus said, I and the Father are one, I can do nothing without the Father, as he and I are One, may they be One in us. So the day our wine runs out is a miracle, it is the day we let God be God and realise at last that as individual body minds we are only God’s empty jars. We have this treasure in empty jars, as 2 Cor 4;7 says, which means we realise we don’t own or control our glasses so Christ does not simply refill them, we are transformed into Christ.

This being in Christ begins to be fully experienced when the wine gives out and we accept our emptiness.  The being in relationship at the source of all existence can’t be realised unless our wine runs out.  And even then, some of us are sorely tempted to look for a substitute by working even harder, doing even more, or smashing our glass altogether.

If we try to escape experience we shrink. If we give that effort up and share God’s divine nature as our birth-right in God’s image, we know the truth - Christ the eternal vintner and chief steward is pouring Godself into everything there is, every sensation and thought, right here, and now. Mary knows, when she says “they have no wine,” that running out of wine is no failure, disaster, shameful calamity, or tragic end we believe it to be, it is openness to the only real Self.

If there had been enough wine, the participants at the wedding would have had to settle for something inferior and illusory and transient. But they received God in their midst, the best wine, by knowing they had run out of their own.

As people with nowhere to turn we realise we are recipients of God’s experience, not separated finite body/minds.  Just as Jesus waited until the cheap stuff ran out before he took water and made 180 gallons of the best wine, God waits until our illusion of self-sufficiency runs out, and we empty ourself of ourself, to allow us to know God’s fullness as all there is. Psalm 36 says this of God - you give them drink from the river of your delights. So, if the wine has run out...

Good.  It isn’t about your separate personal experience, it is about the priceless being whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, and is so close you hardly usually notice it. As St Augustine said, God is closer to you than you are to yourself. So then let yourself go to find God.

A poem describes gladly letting the cheap wine, your limited searching, finally run out. “I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown. He replied: Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way. I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night. God led me to the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.

 
In all life's circumstances, no matter how they feel, open up to the One at the centre of the experiences, the infinite reality of God, the only fine wine, is love flowing in you, as you, and for you, making human and divine one in you if you don’t resist what is happening, and this wonder beauty love potential and peace passes all our understanding.

But it is the truth, of One real being, in relationship.

FSHS +

Welcome