Dear Friends,
We pray you are safe and well.
Today's Meditation comes to us from Matthew Fox who proposes Mystic Wisdom for the 12 Days of Christmas beginning with Dorothy Soelle: Be as Jesus is in the world today.
We invite you to join us as we commit ourselves to working tirelessly to end systemic and structural racism in our society, in healthcare, in the workplace, in the Church--wherever it shows up so that everyone may come to have more abundant life. May this meditation nourish our contemplative-active hearts and sustain all of us in action.
In the spirit of our philosophy of co-creating community and our awareness that the Spirit speaks through each of us, we invite you to share your meditations with us as well. We truly believe that in God’s economy of abundance, when we share our blessings, our thoughts, our feelings, we are all made richer.
We hope and pray that you and your loved ones experience genuine peace of mind and heart, and remain in good health during this challenging time.
May this Christmas Season be a time of peace, of healing and hope, of the infusion of joy in your life!
With our love and care,
Jean & Ron
MEDITATION 238: Dorothy Soelle: Be in the world as Jesus Is
From Annoying Christmas Carols to Mystic Wisdom
December 26, 2020
The Christmas Carol, "the 12 days of Christmas," has been called the "most annoying" of all Christmas carols
Its basic meaning was to remember the 12 days between Christmas and Epiphany. Consumer capitalism emphasizes the front end of Christmas as the time to shop and keep stores in business and consumerism going and "black Friday" promising unheard of bargain basement sales does the same post-Christmas.
Yet the far older tradition was to celebrate 12 days that follow Christmas day itself up to the climax of the Christmas season which is Epiphany, the showing of the Christ child to the greater world represented by the visiting magi who we are told followed a star to Bethlehem to find Jesus in the manger.
Thus the Christmas season extends from Advent (four weeks preceding Christmas) to Epiphany (12 days following Christmas)—a total of about 40 days which has a long lineage in Biblical story telling—40 years wandering in the desert, 40 days of Jesus fasting in the desert after his baptism, etc. And quarantine, forty days that sailors are to stay on the ship before embarking during the time of the bubonic plague to test whether they were bringing the plague with them or not. A practice adapted today obviously to our own version of a plague.
In the spirit of "12 days of (meaning following) Christmas," I share beginning this day after Christmas 12 offerings from twentieth century mystics apropos of Christmas season.
Let us begin with wisdom from theologian Dorothy Soelle:
The goal of the Christian religion is not the idolizing of Christ, not Christolatry, but that we all "are in Christ,’ as the mystical expressions goes, that we have a part in the life of Christ. This savior is a wounded healer, and he heals so that we may become as he is.
Be as he is, laugh as he laughs, weep as he weeps. Heal the sick, even those who without knowing it have contracted the great neuroses of our society, who know no mercy within themselves and their children when they consent to the nuclear state and technologies inimical to life.
To feed the hungry means to do away with militarism. To bless the children means to leave the trees standing for them.*
Soelle is warning us about a form of idolatry she calls "Christolatry." She argues instead for a mystical understand of Christ, namely to be "in Christ," to share in the life of Christ and to heal, laugh, weep and heal as he did. Actions follow that bless children and future generations ‘"by leaving trees standing for them," by combatting climate change and working to heal Mother Earth.
Mysticism heals religion when religion goes off balance and idolatrous and it necessarily leads to action. As William Hocking put it, "the prophet is the mystic in action." Jesus was such a mystic and prophet.