GOD-centric Interior Spiritual Disciplines:

To live in a good and fair God of love

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GOD-centric Interior Spiritual Disciplines Preface: To Live in God

"We do not endure [self-discipline] merely for its own sake, but for what lies beyond it. And we bear those acts of self-denial and self-restraint because we feel and know full well that through such acts alone can we regain the mastery over all our misused powers and learn to use them with a vigour and a joy such as we have never known before… The restraint and discipline he knew full well in those seemingly unfruitful days were but the means to an end. The end is always before him, and the end is positive expression. The dying to his old untrained and bad methods is but the birth throes of a larger and richer action…."

~ Fr. Basil William Maturin (Roman Catholic), Self-Knowledge and Self-Discipline

Spiritual Disciplines

  Let me tell you a story. When I was 28 years old, my husband told me that he wanted a divorce. A minor boot compared to the one I got from God but a boot nonetheless and my world once again dimmed. Once again, I coped by turning to a source of previously reliable comfort but this time that source of comfort was my quote notebook where I collected the poems and prose that helped me light a flame in my dark night of the soul. Like a good monkette, I took to scribing the notebooks over again into a more polished set of journals hoping the wisdom would seep more deeply into my bones in the process but the process felt dry. I turned to the director of my undergraduate honors program for counsel. He told me that even though my practice felt dry at that moment, the habit of scribing wisdom in times of trouble would benefit me in the long run. He was right. Spiritual disciplines are about developing good habits and trudging ahead even when it doesn't feel good or fruitful, working through dark nights and ebbs and flows like a grownup who understands that life (and spiritual growth) is not always a bowl of cherries.

For the sake of analogy, we will refer to specific spiritual disciplines as exercises. Only the loftiest of dreamers among us expect to reach a high state of physical fitness by lounging about or engaging in physical activity only when the spirit moves us and most gentle readers of this little book would claim that their spiritual state is at least as important to them as their physical state. So why not develop a habit of exercising spiritually? Just as a faithfully practiced physical exercise discipline will strengthen us physically, a faithfully practiced spiritual discipline will strengthen us spiritually. The more consistently we practice our spiritual disciplines, the more natural and effective they will become. So let's develop a habit of exercising spiritual disciplines that strengthen a habitual centering in love, goodness, and fairness.

GOD-centric Interior Spiritual Disciplines

  Spiritual disciplines are practiced by many religions, Eastern and Western, and a generous number of guides have been written if you wish to explore the breadth of practices or their history. This slim volume will focus on bringing a GOD-centric orientation to the exercise of selected interior spiritual disciplines. Being GOD-centric means that we transformatively live in and out our always mysterious God of love, goodness, and fairness. The GOD-centric exercise of interior spiritual disciplines focuses on strengthening and deepening our relationship with God to enrich the quality of being we bring to living out God in the world.  GOD-centrics are not ascetics. We believe the body is good and life is to be engaged. By practicing spiritual disciplines, we aim to fill our well with the love, goodness, and fairness we recognize in God and thus become better equipped to be agents of God's love in the world. The big GOD-centric tent contains many good-natured clowns fumbling and bumbling their way toward Truth. GOD-centric agnostics, atheists, nones, spiritual but not religious-ists, and possibilians  (my new favorite) rub elbows with GOD-centric practitioners of every faith tradition and each and every one centers their life on love, goodness, and fairness. Your dear author is but one member of this big and diverse tribe but my voice has to be my own within the chorus so I write as a GOD-centric possibilian who is essentially post-religious but whose Catholic heritage richly infuses her spirituality.

  I also write as a GOD-centric person who questions whether there is an omnibenevolent Force of Love behind the curtain. Even so, "my soul belongs to God, I know. I made that bargain long ago. He gave me hope when hope was gone. He gave me strength to journey on!" (Jean Valjean, Les Misérables) I remain emotionally loyal to the God with whom I shared that youthful practice of the presence relationship while simultaneously doubting God's existence. I miss being in love with God and my heart is still bruised from being left just when I needed him most though I am grateful for the boot which invited me to mature spiritually. I do not wish to regress: "Only that day dawns to which we are awake." (Henry David Thoreau, Walden) Each day, I hope to open my eyes, heart, and mind more fully so I can more fully understand and live out God. I am too awake to think of God as a Being or as bound by any book or prophet or time or space. The God I hope to be true is more a Force or Energy or Ground of Being. Because I can only worship a good God and refuse to kowtow to a lesser God, I postulate that this Force is loving, good, and fair. But is it? Does it even exist? Or I am willing God into existence? My questions do not make me happy but they do make me real. I have the courage to pursue Truth (God) with all my mind, heart, and soul growing and transforming each step of the way.

GOD-centric Doubters

  I relate my questioning to you not to burden you but to share my vulnerability and struggle as I continue to center myself in the God-level concerns of love, goodness, and fairness while also doubting their referent in God. The rise of religious fundamentalism has given equal rise to a skeptical and secular response. Many loving, good, and fair people can no longer find a comfortable home in their religion of origin. Many of these good hearted people still hunger for God, not because they desire a bunch of goodies in eternity, but because they sense and wish to touch a realm of immanence and transcendence beyond the materialist conception of the molecules bandying about in what appears to be our universe. Fortunately GOD-centrics do not measure their faith by their certainty. Our faith is our commitment to seek Truth through the more vivid light of Love. We GOD-centric doubters make our transrational leap while our doubt keeps us honest in our quest to transform towards an embodiment of love, goodness, and fairness.

GOD-centric Believers

  What about my lovely GOD-centric readers who do not doubt? Please, please read on for there is a special task for you. For those within a faith tradition, the task is to filter that tradition through the GOD-centric lens so God is properly recognized as always loving, good, and fair. In this book, I have used the form of Catholic spiritual disciplines yet embraced in GOD-centric fashion prayers and holy book passages from each major religious tradition as long as those prayers and passages could pass through the GOD-centric lens of love, goodness, and fairness. Prayers and passages that suggested that God was unloving, immoral, or unfair were avoided. As stated in the preface to the original GOD-centric: "I think that the majority of people from every religion share the belief that God is loving, good, and fair and just need a common language to bring clarity to their own tradition and to engage in fruitful dialogue with people from other traditions." I hope this volume will open a window to the beauty of other traditions that also reach toward our shared God of love, goodness, and fairness.

  So, GOD-centric doubters will leap transrationally and GOD-centric believers will trust heartfully as we exercise interior spiritual disciplines. Our GOD-centric interior spiritual disciplines will help us live in responsive loving relationship with God in a spirit of openness and awareness; develop a quality of being abundantly filled with love, compassion, peace, joy, hope, and wonder; return to the Source of Love for renewed strength in the face of depletion and adversity; and pursue the ongoing process of improving our capacity to know our eternal good and fair God of love in our heart, soul, and mind.

GOD-centric Interior Spiritual Disciplines: The Book

  Before we begin to exercise, we will warm-up by establishing trust through sharing music and art which help deliver our souls to God. Then the exercising will begin with a GOD-centric re-visioning of the canonical prayers for the hours; a silent retreat into God in contemplative prayer; prayers of adoration, petition, intercession, and thanksgiving; and reflection on passages from holy books in Lectio Divina. We will cool down by sharing books of value in our study of God's love, goodness, and fairness because God loves for us to use our brains as well as our hearts and souls.

  This book contains a lot of words because such is the nature of books; however, the words are not the point. Hopefully some of the words point to the point and the point is God. I believe that our success in the exercise of spiritual disciplines is best measured by whom we are off-mat: How are we affecting the movement of love in the world? Are we expressing love more widely? Asking the passionate questions of existence? Being transformed by the Force of Love? Let's drink from the well of God so we can give to the world a quality of being that is centered in God's love, goodness, and fairness rather than a quality of being that is depleted and seeking its own satisfaction:

"I know the way you can get

When you have not had a drink of Love:

Your face hardens

Your sweet muscles cramp.

Children become concerned

About a strange look that appears in your eyes

Which even begins to worry your own mirror

And nose.

Squirrels and birds sense your sadness

And call an important conference in a tall tree.

They decide which secret code to chant

To help your mind and soul.

Even angels fear that brand of madness

That arrays itself against the world

And throws sharp stones and spears into

The innocent

And into one's self.

O I know the way you can get

If you have not been drinking Love:

You might rip apart

Every sentence your friends and teachers say,

Looking for hidden clauses.

You might weigh every word on a scale

Like a dead fish.

You might pull out a ruler to measure

From every angle in your darkness

The beautiful dimensions of a heart you once

Trusted.

I know the way you can get

If you have not had a drink from Love's

Hands.

That is why all the Great Ones speak of

The vital need

To keep remembering God,

So you will come to know and see Him

As being so Playful

And Wanting,

Just Wanting to help.

That is why Hafiz says:

Bring your cup near me.

For all I care about

Is quenching your thirst for freedom!

All a Sane man can ever care about

Is giving Love!"

~ Hafiz, "I Know The Way You Can Get"