God Loves Us With Everything God’s Got
Devotion to God in the Integral Christian Community
Part Four
Jesus invites us to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength (Mark 12:28). Previously, we saw that, in an evolution from the commandment ethos of the Hebrew Scriptures, God does not want mere outward obedience. God wants all of us — heart, mind, soul, and strength.
This kind of love cannot be demanded but only awakened. By virtue of our divine DNA, we already have that big love of God slumbering deep down within our inner being. Jesus came to arouse this embedded love so that we realize it in our consciousness and actions. Beginning within our heart, mind, soul-centered womb, and feet-anchored strength.
WAKING UP GOD’S LOVE WITH OUR MIND
The previous article in this series explored awakening God’s love in our hearts. Now we move on to our mind. Whenever I hear the word God, I immediately ask myself which face of God is being talked about? Opening to the love of God in our mind center of spiritual knowing is almost always about the Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us.
“And the peace that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil 4:6). We may begin with the thinking mind, but we always reach a limit to what we can understand. Then we release ourselves to go beyond the best thinking we can find and enter the transcendent beyond of stillness and formlessness.
First, as Ultimate Source, God lovingly set in motion the factors that would evolve our minds to the incredible functionality and complexity they are at today. In partnership with our minds, the mind of God emerged in the mental structure of consciousness with the extraordinary mental capacity that has created the technological and medical marvels that allow us to live longer and more fully.
Gebser calls this “the emergence of directed or discursive thought” with which Western science would be built, beneficial as long as it does not claim to be the only form of knowing reality, as it would eventually begin to do. Devotion to God in the balanced, “efficient” mental structure embraces and acknowledges the glory and wonder of science as it reveals and explores the universe.
We can use our minds to clear up traditional misconceptions about Jesus and Christianity
Many of us come from traditional Christian backgrounds and have spent time and energy deconstructing our Christianity to reflect more of Jesus and less of previous worldviews of spiritual development. Now we long for teaching, litanies, hymns, and song words that reflect our evolving spirituality and theology. This means we need a Christian community where we are not constantly being jarred by dissonance or by having to inwardly translate traditional words and ideas into their progressive versions. (Although I am finding, the older I get, the more I can let in the beauty and heartfelt devotion of many traditional Christian hymns without letting the specific language bother me.)
Deconstructed Christianity means, for me, that I believe God loves and welcomes everyone home, no longer believing that God punishes anyone or will send anyone to eternal torment.
While the traditional Trinity was helpful historically in framing an evolutionary advance in understanding God, I believe the word “God,” used in an integrated way, includes all three faces or perspectives of God and includes and transcends all genders and sexual orientations.
I no longer think I am a “fallen” sinner, but I am made in the image of God and am incarnate divinity like Jesus. As Richard Rohr says, “Our DNA is divine, and the divine indwelling is never earned by any behavior, group membership, or ritual whatsoever, but only recognized and realized (see Romans 11:6; Ephesians 2:8–10) and thus fallen in love with.”
I no longer hold to the purity codes of the Old Testament and traditional Christianity, which would label anything outside of an abusively narrow definition of sexual expression as “dirty.”
This results in the silliness of “Sex is dirty. Save it for marriage.”
And there are many more beliefs and ideas that also contribute to the further freedom and opening of our minds into more evolved and integral understandings. All of which we can then let go of in the transcendent mind.
At this level, we may, at times, move into pure cosmic beingness beyond the realm of thought, images, and forms. As Meister Eckhart said, “I swam in the ocean of divinity until I went beyond the Trinity.”
The devotional love language of the grounded mind, anchored in our earthly embodiment and focused on God-Beyond-Us, may use words from theology, philosophy, and science such as infinite, transcendent, cosmic, and quantum. The Apostle Paul relied heavily on the royal court metaphors of his day to describe his grand, universal vision of the Cosmic Christ. However, modern discoveries of an infinite universe along with quantum metaphors do that much better today.
Let God love you in your mind!
WAKING UP GOD’S LOVE IN OUR SOUL-CENTERED WOMB
When talking about God loving us in our soul-sourced gut, we are almost always referring to the Inner Face of God-Being-Us.
The word “soul” has been stretched into a number of popular meanings. Meister Eckhart wrote: “There is something in the soul which is so closely akin to God that it is already one with him and does not need to become united to him.” However, among mystics and meditators, the soul or gut is the source of our deepest identity. Hence, our divine identity is birthed in our spiritual womb.
But along with this divine identity of already-oneness, as humans, we also need to experience God’s love in our womb through the passionate energy of eros drawing us to greater intimacy. We explored this in part two of this series, but I’d like to say a little more about here too.
The passion of gut-centered eros
The Christian faith claims that not only God loves us, but that God loves us in such an intimate way that the Scripture compares that love to the love of two people, husband and wife, in that time and culture. Today it includes wife and wife, husband and husband, and partners in their most intimate embrace. The New Testament uses marital images of Jesus as the groom and those who follow him as the bride. While that points to other dimensions besides eros, it would be ridiculous to make marriage a metaphor of things like love and faithfulness but fail to mention sex! God made us sexual beings. We are bodies with a desire for union, which helps to tell the story of God’s love for us. And in Jesus, God took on a body to reveal divine spiritual love in erotic flesh.
The Bible’s Sexy book
We see this sexiness in the enigmatic Song of Songs (or Solomon), Bible’s R-rated book.
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth— for your love is more delightful than wine.
He replied, “You are tall and supple, like the palm tree, and your full breasts are like sweet clusters of dates.
I’m going to climb that palm tree! I’m going to caress its fruit!”
She murmured back, “Breathe on my garden, fill the air with spice fragrance.
Oh, let my lover enter his garden! Yes, let him eat the fine, ripe fruits.”
So, he took me home with him for a festive meal, but his eyes feasted on me!
—Song of Songs
Scholars agree that the Song of Solomon is, first of all, an erotic love poem. Mystics and saints down through the ages tell us that it is also an image of the passionate love God has for us.
The energy of eros—one of the most potent forces in the human body—is a powerful and sacred force of attraction that draws us forward, beyond ourselves, into a union with another human and with God.
Sadly, throughout most of its history, the Christian church has denied and fought against this energy.
In Tantric Jesus: The Erotic Heart of Early Christianity, James Hughes Reho and Matthew Fox write, “The erotic life is our life of deep desire, including our instinctual cravings for food and water, our sexual longings, our drive to create beauty and art, and our refined compassionate desires to serve the good of others and the planet. This erotic life is both highly spiritual and deeply physical.”
Pope Benedict XVI said that true erotic love offers a path “towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.” Devotion flowing with eros takes us out of ourselves and toward the object of our love.
In An Erotic God, Tina Schermer Sellers says, “Sterilizing Jesus, ignoring Christ as Lover, is to deny Him and us the mystery of being fully alive, fully embodied and fully committed to living out His practice of love. It is to cast body from spirit. To continue the dichotomizing is to continue to force sexuality underground where culture will feed it, objectify it and sell it. The ‘textbook’ Jesus has been studied as a historical event—safely enclosed in a time capsule, exhibited and examined, ensuring that our relationship with Him and with our bodies is scientific, orderly, and safe. This reductionist view of Christ may have served institutional development, but it has injured our intimate embrace and understanding of Jesus and thus our faith.”
Eros as a spiritual resource
Vivian Claire, spiritual teacher and South African member of Integral Christian Network, says that getting in touch with the gut or spiritual womb “restores the flow of eros energy as a spiritual resource.” She points out that for much of Western spirituality, the purpose of eros energy is limited to sexual relationships. Many are not aware of the beautiful circuitry between the pole of the heart center and the womb center outside of sexual activity. The practices of whole-body awareness can restore this flow of eros energy and bring back the qualities of holy eros into play.
She says, “Eros energy has particular qualities of tenderness, of intensity, of beauty, devotion and wholesome delight. Eros energy is drawn from the womb center up into the heart center to nourish and intensify the spiritual heart of perception. Eros energy moves not only within us but between us and beyond us, radiating out into the world. The divine eros in the deeper self attracts human eros infusing and aligning the powerful sexual instincts for its own purposes. This is vitalizing for healthy bodies, for bringing a quality of devotion to all kinds of intimacy. And it is eros longing that is our fuel for devotion and prayer.”
Let God love you passionately in your spiritual womb!
WAKING UP GOD’S FIERCE LOVE IN OUR FEET-GROUNDED STRENGTH
“Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways.” Proverbs 4:26-27
God communicates the glory of our incarnation, nature, and the entire cosmos through our feet. Our feet send the knowing of God’s devotion to us through Mother Earth.
From the soles of our feet, we receive the energy of Mother Earth as a tree receives nourishment from its roots connected to the soil. Our feet connect our bodies with the earth, nature, and the entire material cosmos.
Our feet support and connect us with the Earth. They’re the mechanism through which we energetically directly communicate with our planet, passing infinite messages between our body and the core of our beloved home. It’s our feet that support us. It’s our feet that carry us through life, feeling every little nuance of what both motivates and also deters us from moving ahead, unhindered and in our power.
God wraps us in anchoring messages of safety, security, and understanding of the world through our feet. Think of the metaphors, landing on both feet and putting your best foot forward. And most powerfully, taking a stand. These are statements of divine confidence.
Our feet signal God’s divine gift of the freedom to choose our own path. Here is a symbol of our freedom to move and choose a path. We say, “This is the path I have chosen. It is here that I stand.”
And Abraham Lincoln testified in word and deed, “Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.”
When we stand firmly on our sacred ground, we become the hands and feet, heart and voice of God for the healing of the world.
Let God love you fiercely with the strength of your anchored feet!
Practice: God in Three Dimensions
WORDS FOR INDIVIDUAL USE:
Infinite God beyond me, in whom I live and move and have my being.
Intimate God beside me; you are always with me.
Inner God being me: I am the light of the world.
Infinite God beyond me, in whom I live and move and have my being.
Intimate God beside me; you are always with me.
Inner God being me: I am the light of the world.
WORDS FOR GROUP USE:
Infinite God beyond us, in whom we live and move and have our being.
Intimate God beside us; you are always with us.
Inner God being us; we are the light of the world.
Infinite God beyond us, in whom we live and move and have our being.
Intimate God beside us; you are always with us.
Inner God being us; we are the light of the world.
Here is a link to God in Three Dimensions video
Sing along with it in your devotion time. Your group can sing along (everyone’s mute on, please) with my former church congregation in the video for a gathered integral “church service” experience. (You may notice that we are doing an older hand movement of God Being Us with our hands on our hearts. We had yet to learn that our spiritual womb is the primary source of our divine identity.) Here are the words to the new hymn.
GOD IN THREE DIMENSIONS
Music by Jean Sibelius (“Finlandia”)
Words by Wanda Heatwole
Concept by Paul Smith
Infinite God, beyond our comprehension
in whom we are, and live and move.
O Divine Mystery, O vast Creator,
Infinite God, we stand in awe of you.
O Divine Mystery, O vast Creator,
Infinite God, we stand in awe of you.
Intimate God, each day you’re always with us.
Emmanuel, a God who’s always there.
Jesus, our guide, our friend, and our model,
Intimate God, we offer praise to you.
Jesus, our guide, our friend, and our model,
Intimate God, we offer praise to you.
O Inner God, within us as our true self,
energy cosmic, light divine.
We are your shining light to the whole world.
O Inner God, we now give thanks to you.
We are your shining light to the whole world.
O Inner God, we now give thanks to you.
O God, revealed in three dimensions,
as divine mystery, friend, and light.
You’re ever-present, with us as we journey,
Infinite, Intimate, and Inner God.
You’re ever-present, with us as we journey,
Infinite, Intimate, and Inner God.