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LOTUS OF THE HEART
An Interspiritual-Interfaith Work
of The Lotus Fellowship and
Arem Nahariim-Samadhi
Arem, a vowed Contemplative of Greenbough House of Prayer, offers an interspiritual work focusing on cultivating the Heart of Compassion. He integrates wisdom from the major spiritual Paths. To contact Arem, see the email address at the conclusion of this presentation. May you always know you are blessed!
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*Lotus Flower - Lotus Petals, Bahman Farzad, Flickr
There is one mind, one energy, that sustains all of life.
You are part of that mind, part of that energy.
*Julia Cameron. Answered Prayers.
Devotional Thoughts
After several years of practicing meditation and contemplation, I approached one of my first Teachers. We were sitting at a table at the Prayer House. I said, "I am confused about whether God is personal or impersonal." She replied, "Oh, I think God is both."
See, I had come up taught that God is a big Father, somewhat a big Man in the heavens, way beyond the clouds. Buddhism and Christian contemplation had introduced me to nonanthropomorphic ways of referring to God. Anthropomorphisms are ways of attributing human traits to nonhuman realities. The God I had come to experience could no longer be contained in anthropomorphic language. In fact, this God could no longer be, but by symbol or sign, "God."
I was coming to be able to joyfully exclaim, as did the Franciscan mystic Blessed Angela Foligno (b. 1248) repeatedly while on her deathbed, "O Unknown Nothingness! O Unknown Nothingness!" Foligno had direct, or contemplative, encounters with Divine Presence. She described that Presence in the world:
The eyes of my soul were opened, and I beheld the plenitude of God, in which I did comprehend the whole world, both here and beyond the sea, and the abyss and ocean and all things. In all these things I beheld nothing except the divine power, in a totally indescribable way; so that through excess marveling the soul cried with a loud voice, saying, "This whole world is pregnant with God!"
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Jesus gives a human face to this ever-present, ever-flowing Fulness; Jesus gives a face to the timeless, spaceless Word, which is the Plenitude filling and giving Life to all. While Christ, as Plenitude, cannot be reduced to Jesus, neither can Jesus be deducted from Christ: such is the union of Spirit and Flesh.
Creation is the embodiment of the Word. Without the Word, Creation could not be. Without the Word, you could not be. Without the Word, I could not be. Without the Word, the Plenitude of All, nothing could be, for the Word, Christ, is the Plenitude of Being-Becoming. For the Word, as noted in the early Christian scripture Colossians 1.17 (The Message), "was there before any of it [Nature] came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment."
We see the union of Christ and Jesus, in Jesus Christ, as calling us each to the realization, with Foligno, and mystics of many faiths, that everything is infused with Divinity. All Nature, seen and unseen—including you and me, indeed, all called animate or inanimate—are part of Grace, as Creative Potency.
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Christmas invites us to this mystery of Spirit and Flesh, God and Cosmos, Transcendence and Plenitude. Christmas gives a face to Infinity, while that face of Presence leads us to the Mystical Marriage. This Marriage is the actualization of experiential Union with the Plenitude of Grace, even as Christ is the perfect Union that shows us the Way to the Fullness of love, joy, and peace.
If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
*William Blake
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The Sacred in Me bows to the Sacred in You
*Photo, Angelito De Luz
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♥ ♥ ♥
* * * CLOSING BLESSING * * *
Namaste'
Arem's book of mystical love poetry, Brian K. Wilcox. An Ache for Union, can be ordered through major bookdealers.
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