Prayer of Opening
As fire kindles brushwood
and causes water to boil,
so, Holy One,
set our hearts on fire.
Refine our souls,
as we prepare
for the coming of a new order
of consciousness,
of kinship and connection,
and of justice,
prefigured in Jesus,
but rising like yeast,
even now,
in hearts that burn with clear intention.
Even now,
the new order is coming,
in us.
Amen.
This morning is the beginning of a season known as Advent in the church calendar. It is a season of anticipation, consisting of the thirty days leading up to Christmas. I was mentioning this to a friend who happens to be Jewish. She told me that she loved Advent. I asked her what it meant to her as a Jew. What she loved about it was this sense of “ready-ing” ourselves in preparation for some momentous occasion. She had a sense that “rituals of readying” (or preparation) actually creates the conditions to effect a real change that is already on its way. These preparatory rituals evoke the requisite “alertness” or awakening to that new order that is coming. More than this, observing a season such as this one helps to quicken its arrival and actually manifest that which is being awaited. In other words something is in the air, something is stirring, something is on its way, and we can participate in its arrival—by bringing our focused attention to it here and now.
If you are child we know what that something is —it’s Christmas, replete with the stockings, gifts, family, and last but not least the birth of the baby Jesus. So that is, of course, a part of what we’re anticipating. We mark off the Advent calendars in preparation for the baby Jesus to be born. But I want to gently suggest that if we’re adults, chronologically and spiritually, it’s hard to get too excited by an event that happened two thousand years ago, and has been celebrated every year since.
So, what are we anticipating? For what are we on red alert, maintaining this state of alert and focused attention, as the author of Mark’s gospel calls for? It’s possible that in the days when the text was written that the early community was expecting the literal return of Jesus. Indeed, the true meaning of this season involves preparing for the return of Christ. We tell the story of Jesus’ birth as part of that absolutely. But today, no postmodern Christian is actually holding her breath for Jesus to come floating down out of the sky. It ain’t going to happen.
I want to suggest that this season of Advent is all about building anticipation and expectation for the birth of Christ consciousness. This birth will manifest as a change in the social order as well. But this morning I want to focus on consciousness. I know this sounds a tad new agey, but let me elaborate. First, what do we mean by “consciousness”. It interests me that in the rest of my spiritual life outside of the church, the word “consciousness” is omnipresent. I don’t know why it hasn’t entered our vocabulary. In the world of science it is considered to be the “hard” problem. What this means is that brain researchers can’t really figure out what the heck it is. Does consciousness—this capacity not only to be aware, but also to be aware that we are aware—come out of a brain? But you can dissect brain tissue until the cows come home and you won’t find anything resembling “awareness”. Is it a property of atoms and molecules, or something that arises from the electricity generated by neurological synapses firing off in the brain? Some scientists think so.
If you want a real interesting read over the holiday season pick up a copy of Deepak Chopra’s new book, The War of Worldviews. It’s a heated, but respectful debate between a physicist, and Mr. Chopra about, in part, the nature of consciousness. The physicist takes the view that it’s an emergent property of matter, and that in time science will figure out what it is. It’s physicalistic, in other words. What it isn’t for this eminent man of science is the very fabric and foundation of Reality out of which the physical universe arises. To use a metaphor that theologian, Paul Tillich, popularized it is the Ground of Being, and I would add, the Ground of Becoming. This, of course, is Deepak Chopra’s position. In fact, for Deepak, a field of information, energy, and consciousness effectively replaces the word “God”, because consciousness is the field of pure potentiality, infinite possibility, and the creativity that is always bringing forth new worlds, both material and mental. [1]
An interesting thing about consciousness is that while it remains an enigma to scientists, mystics have been experiencing it directly for thousands of years. Anybody here, if you decided to practice meditation with Sam on Tuesday evenings, could experience it for yourself. In my experience some of the qualities I associate with pure awareness include: expansiveness, clarity, formlessness (no thoughts, images, feelings), vast emptiness, alert stillness, generativity, profound restfulness, freedom, and, while not a force in itself, yet it is strangely magnetic in its attractiveness—once you’ve tasted it, you feel like you want to stay. To be in this state is to be truly awake.
Eastern traditions, and the mystics of Christianity have learned that the fastest way to evolve, or to deepen one’s spiritual life, is to rest in pure awareness, and then bring this awareness to bear on one’s own life and activities. On one level, it’s very simple. All we need to do is to begin to intentionally notice our lives—that is, bring conscious awareness to what you are doing, thinking, and feeling. The act of noticing spontaneously brings perspective. We witness our lives even as we are experiencing our daily routines. When we notice our thoughts, emotions, attitudes, emotions, and the stories we well ourselves about reality, we grow in freedom. We realize that we have feelings, ideas, and stories, but they don’t have us. We don’t absolutely identify with them. They are happening in us and to us, but they only a part of us. We begin to identify with a deeper, more enduring, and even eternal essence, that is pure awareness, and that has shown up in the package that wears our name.
The Gnostic gospel of Thomas puts it this way in one of the logion: “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.” (Logion 70). This is an earlier attempt to describe the healing and evolutionary impact of conscious awareness. You bring what is within you forth, by becoming conscious of it. Then you can look at it. You will be saved, that is made whole. You will realize the undivided wholeness of Reality, and that you are an expression of that Wholeness. You are not separate from this energy, information, and consciousness out of which you emerged. You are That.
So what about “Christ” consciousness then? What is it? Well, when this field of Pure Awareness, outside of time and space, enters into the relative world of form, it brings forth a world—and that world, both inside and outside is evolving. After almost 14 billion years, there emerged the qualities of unconditional love and unreserved compassion that existed from all eternity in the realm of pure potential. These qualities are the manifestations of the unmanifest field of Pure Awareness. For Christians, this love, compassion, and wisdom is called “Christ”, made known in Jesus of Nazareth, but also in other great mystics and teacher from other traditions, both ancient and modern.
Christ consciousness is Pure Awareness infused with the unconditional love and unreserved compassion. And if you think it’s easy to awaken to this quality of presence, it’s not. If it were so easy, we wouldn’t need to be reminded by the author of Mark’s gospel to wake up and be alert; we wouldn’t need yoga teachers teaching about awareness; we wouldn’t need our Sunday morning rituals. This is why we come to church on a regular basis—because we tap into this loving field of awareness, and then we forget. Our hearts and minds open, and then life grabs us by the scruff of the neck and says, “you’re coming with me”. Life drags us into the illusory realm of separation consciousness, in which I am a solitary individual, disconnected from the Whole.
We fall asleep into a culturally induced trance of isolation and division. The culprits that cause us to fall asleep are legion. Let’s name a few. We’ll have Andrew put them up on the screen.
(Worry, stress, exhaustion, busyness, anger, addiction)
Now, let’s do a short meditation together. Put your left hand over your heart. Feel as much love as possible emanating from your heart. Focus this loving and compassionate awareness on your own life, on your heart. Do you need to forgive yourself for anything? Are you carrying around messages about yourself that are unkind? Are the unconscious beliefs, that you are bad, unworthy, sinful, inadequate, lacking in any way? Bring loving and compassionate awareness to yourself, and feel the release of your soul, as the heart of Christ heals you.
Bring it to bear on the ones you love, those closest to you. Bring each person to mind and the love and compassion overflow. It’s not unusual for these to be the most difficult people to truly bring Christ’s loving awareness to, because we take them for granted, we fall asleep to their beauty and radiance. If you are holding a grudge, or bitterness, or withholding yourself from any of them, the light of Christ consciousness has already re’eased them. Awaken to the Heart of your own heart.
Expand it to include the whole Earth and our kin creatures. Maybe you have an image of Earth floating in space. Bring loving awareness to our planet, She who gives life to us and all creatures. Awaken to the miracle that this planet is a living organism, teeming with astounding diversity. Bring compassionate awareness to the suffering of animals and ecosystems, and for the whole community of life. This is our home. We belong here. We are a manifestation of Earth’s yearning for fullness and freedom.
Now bring this mysterious thing we are calling Christ consciousness to bear on those you consider to be your enemies, the ones who have hurt us in some way, those whom we may want to blame for our life condition. Chances are that they too are fighting a great battle. Imagine the fear in their heart that has them in its grip. Can you see them with the eyes of this loving awareness? This doesn’t justify what they may have done, but you can hold them in loving awareness and release your attachment to these people.
Hold it all; hold everything and every one in this state of Christ consciousness.
In Advent, when we affirm that we are anticipating the advent of Christ, I want to suggest that this taste of a new order of love and compassion is what we’re anticipating breaking through into our lives in a more permanent way. We are preparing our souls in this season for advent to give birth to a New Order of Love. We’re watching for signs of this consciousness permeating our very being, as the lesson of the fig tree makes clear: first the tender new branch, then the leaves, followed by the fruit of Pure Loving Awareness. We long for the day when we bring this kind of attention of our every moment of existence, to all we meet on the street, to our parenting, and to our work lives. We long for the day when we realize that this is the only sane way to live, in alignment with the true nature of Reality. This is the day when we truly awaken to being the presence of Love in these earthly forms. And the birth we await this Christmas is the joyful emergence of our true nature, and one by one, the collective birth of a new humanity. Christ is coming. Christ is being born again, through you, through us. Awaken friends.
Crystal bowl rings.
[1] Chopra, D. (2000). How to Know God: The Soul’s Journey Into the Mystery of Mysteries. New York: Three Rivers Press.
