There is an elephant in the room filled with cultural creatives who find some affinity for evolved versions of Christianity. And hardly anyone is noticing it. Or, if they do, it is either too embarrassing or too difficult to talk about. This elephant is the gigantic clash of postmodern rejection of all hierarchies and the obvious hierarchy of surrender to God. Even more distasteful is devotion to a personal Jesus as someone who is more advanced than we are and invites us to die to our constructed self and follow him.
Read MoreIntegral Christian Devotional Practices: Gazing Part 2
David, king, poet, and prophet, revealed his deepest longings when he wrote: “One thing have I asked of God, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the presence of God all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of God” (Psalm 27:4).
Previously I said that the heart of spiritual devotion to God comes alive by gazing into the visionary or symbolic eyes of personal forms of God’s divine friendship. These can include God’s motherly-fatherly presence, the Living Jesus, Mary, other spiritual companions, physically present friends, and the beauty of creation itself whose cosmic eyes do indeed gaze back at us. We continue here to explore that theme.
Gazing upon the beauty of God in its many forms—deep, attentive looking—can be integrated into our lives as a spiritual practice.
Read MoreIntegral Christian Devotional Practices: Part 1 – Gazing
While cultural creatives often have mixed feelings about worship, many of them still long for something they can truly open up their hearts to. Many feel wonder at the vast, cosmic Mystery but perhaps have a desire (sometimes unconscious) to still connect personally to it in some way, to devote themselves to something—someone—beyond just than themselves.
The heart of devotion comes alive by gazing into visionary or symbolic eyes of God. This is the personal, 2nd person presence of the divine as expressed in the tangible other. While experiencing God as 1st person spirit is a vital part of our journey, devotion is awakened through “seeing” such personal forms of the Divine Mystery as God’s motherly-fatherly presence, the presence of the Living Jesus, the spiritual and physical beings around us, and the beautiful presence of creation itself whose cosmic eyes do indeed gaze back at us.
Read MoreWhy Christian Worship Doesn’t Work for Many Cultural Creatives—and What Might - Part Two
The challenge today for culturally creative followers of Jesus is to wrestle the heart of Christianity from the powerful grip of institutional religion. We need to take Christianity back from the theology and practices of institutional religion including what is commonly referred to as “worship.”
Many postmodern or integral “post” Christians no longer identify or connect with a religious group or church. Many also have mixed feelings about using the word “Christian.” For some it can carry too much baggage. However, they may not yet have given up on Jesus or a core reality of deep spirituality experienced in their native tongue of Christianity. But often the traditional churches no longer tap into that reality for them.
What do they do with what today we traditionally refer to as “worship”? Where do they go to experience this? They may have even given up on the whole idea, since the very word “’worship” may also carry cultural baggage and bad memories. For many, it may even be too difficult to think in those terms. Underneath the baggage, worship is a deep human longing for something transcendent, something worth devoting ourselves to. Everyone has this need in some way or another.
Read MoreWHAT IS A CULTURAL CREATIVE?
In The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World by sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson, the authors introduce the term "Cultural Creatives" to describe a large segment in Western society who since about 1985 have developed beyond the standard paradigm of progressives versus conservatives. In 2001, Ray and Anderson claimed to have found 50 million adult Americans (slightly over one quarter of the adult population) who could be identified as belonging to this group. They estimated an additional 80–90 million “cultural creatives” exist in Europe. Those numbers have almost certainly increased since then.
The Awakening by Kimberly Kirk
Here are some of the characteristics Ray and Sherry Anderson found in cultural creatives:
Read MoreOpening to your Spiritual Guides Part 2
The experience of devotion to Jesus in the mystical visionary realm is the doorway to accessing your own spiritual messengers. Others, such as Cynthia Bourgeault call the mystical visionary realm “the imaginal realm.” Ken Wilber calls it “subtle consciousness.” I prefer “visionary realm” because that is the language the New Testament uses, and the word “vision” is commonly understood today in the mystical sense of seeing things that are not in the physical realm.
Visions include the sensed presence of another spiritual being, a picture, thought, feeling, bodily sensation, or an intuition that arises from your luminous interior. These can range from a fleeting moment to a dramatic journey in a deep trance state.
We find visions throughout the Bible and some specifically occurring in in what the New Testament refers three times to as a “trance” state. Christianity’s most vital originating moments occurred in a series of mystical visions by . . . .
Read MoreI have to admit, when I first read Paul Smith talking about spiritual guides, I was a little put off. My spirituality had become a little too sophisticated for something so New Age-y as that. Ok maybe Jesus. I mean, sure I had a relationship with him early on in my faith, and if I was honest with myself, I still often felt his presence—when I happened to think about him being with me. Or was that just my imagination? And that “personal relationship” buddy Jesus stuff, wasn’t that all a little, immature?
In the course of evolving forward, we all need to go through processes of differentiating and integrating, of transcending and including. As I disentangled myself from a limited, narrow evangelicalism, I was left with many triggers and scars. Many of them still remain, but I was fortunate enough to also have had some pretty powerful experiences of God that always stayed with me. Navigating through what was real and what wasn’t was a difficult task, especially without knowing where to find guidance. Many people end up throwing everything out, and for many of them that may be the best thing to do, at least for awhile.
Fortunately for me, I didn’t get . . . .
Read MoreTen of us were having a lovely conversation after dinner with well-known, brilliant Christian teacher and author. We were sharing childhood stories and she said she had a make-believe friend that was her closest companion in her early years. His name was Luke and she pretended he was Luke, the Gospel writer. I asked her why and she said because he said that was who he was. My ears and heart perked up. I said, “What if you dropped the “make-believe” and “pretended” and considered that he really was that Luke. What if he was one of your spiritual guides? You certainly followed in his footsteps as a teacher and author!” There was silence around the table as everyone waited for her response—and probably a little shocked at my audacity to suggest such a far-out thing to this famous person. She smiled, and I don’t know if she ever pursued it. It is certainly not the norm in her academic setting that anyone would consider such a thing.
Would you consider such a thing?
Read MoreDiscovering and Practicing Mysticism – Part Two
So, how do we practice mysticism?
Once we’ve cleared up some of the common misperceptions about mysticism, we find that we can approach mysticism from a trans-rational perspective, believing that it is real and something we participate in, experienced in connection to our Higher Self, and deeply connective to others. You can read more in depth about those distinctions in Part One.
Getting past some of those mental hurdles, we now can step into our participatory practice. This is a co-creative process that we engage in with our whole being. While mystical experience can be received in many different forms and ways, we can practice our active engagement into the process by cultivating mystical awareness, learning to sense emergent mystical realities, then interplay dynamically with them and one another in convergent communion.
Read MoreDiscovering and Practicing Mysticism – Part One
Pew research from 2009 revealed that 49% of Americans say they have had a religious or mystical experience, defined as a “moment of sudden religious insight or awakening.” 10 years later, that number is most likely higher. It has been climbing up steadily from only 22% in 1962. The numbers may be even higher considering that many may have had such experiences but wouldn’t want to put the term “religious” on it for a variety of reasons.
Have you had a mystical experience?
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