THE PATH OF CONSECRATION
Yeshua, the eternal and universal Christ, is the Sacred Path. Institutional definitions of the historical Jesus, his message, conceptions and beliefs about him, over which religions and the powers of the world have fought, are not the sacred path. Yeshua the Christ, the Life and Presence who abides in the deep sanctuary of the human heart, is the Sacred Path of holiness and sanctification, the path of the consecration of our life.
Consecration means to unite or align with the Sacred. In Christian terms it means to allow the Light of Christ to illumine our lives, to allow the Living Water of Christ’s Mercy and Love to flow freely through us. It means to utterly merge every aspect of our soul and humanity to be immersed in and united with Christ. In this short work I will focus on how to walk this Path that is Christ, how to establish the “praxis” of an interior Christianity. “Praxis” means practice, or the actualizing of Christ’s Presence in our life and soul. As early Christians, who called themselves the “Followers of the Way”, we also in our time have an opportunity to walk the Way into deepening, conscious intimacy with the Light of Christ within.
Most Christians have been acculturated since childhood into a religion based on doctrinaire ideology of the mind and solidified in institutional power structures rather than offered a discipline of transfiguration and harmonization of the soul with the Light of Christ in the deep heart. In large part this is the consequence of a lack of unitive depth experience in many religious leaders as well as a lack of a transformative map to offer adherents. The Christian East, inspired by desert mysticism, has at least upheld the vision of an interior transfiguration based upon the spiritual teachings of Theosis, divinization, or Christification of the soul from within. Most Christians, however, are unaware of our spiritual birthright of being consciously indwelled and enlivened by Christ within as the core of religion. Blessedly, the secret stream of Christian mysticism, which has run throughout the history of Christianity, is becoming more available for individuals who long to be thus illumined and consciously united with Christ.
The Spiritual Theology of Theosis and the Praxis of Soul Healing
The often overlooked mystical depths of the canonical and non-canonical Gospels and other Christian spiritual texts inform us that any real transformation and healing of the soul must involve unifying our human soul/consciousness with the inner Light and Fire of Christ, the process of transfiguration, sanctification, or what the fourteenth century mystic, Julian of Norwich, calls the “oneing” of the soul with Christ. To tend to the inner Fire of Christ’s Presence takes vigilance. In the “praxis” or actualization of Theosis, we must offer our entire selves moment by moment, day by day, to be consumed and made “one” with Yeshua’s Fire. (“Fire” was the metaphoric image of early desert Christians to mean the Spirit of God.) Our humanity, with all its trials and blessings, is the fuel for the Fire that He is kindling on earth. (“I came to cast fire upon the earth and how I wish it were already kindled.” Luke 12:49) And the locus of this praxis is the cave of the heart. Clearly, in this dimension of Christianity, the source of all spiritual transformation, inspiration, and mercy arises from the inner Fire of Christ who dwells within the heart and not the accumulated indoctrination of ideas and ideals of the mind.
Christ as interior Presence, must be our religion and our life, and not the maps of the religious life or the institutions who enshrine them In the canonical Gospels. Yeshua is the Word of God or Divine Logos (God’s Self-Expression), and the kingdom of union with Him is within. And we are invited to that union, “ Abide in my love.” (Jn 15:9) “Abide in me as I abide in you.” (Jn 15:4) In the canonical Gospels Yeshua is the Light of the human soul but also the Light of all Creation. “ I am the Light of the World.” (Jn 18:12). In the Gospel of Thomas the same truth is stated in similar fashion: In the Gospel of Thomas Yeshua is the uncreated Fire and Light of God, present in the world. “I am the Light that Shines on everyone. I am the All. The All came forth from me and the All came into me.” (Logion 77) The images are Light and Fire, expressions of the Divine Life and Essence brought into the world. These themes are continued in the desert hermit and monastic tradition where the spiritual journey is understood as the uniting of our soul with the uncreated Light and Fire of Christ within. “Why not become all Fire?” says Abba Joseph. (Apothegmata). Later the 16th century mystic, John of the Cross, expresses this same truth metaphorically in his spiritual poem, The Living Flame of Love.
Today we are faced with a choice between two paradigms of Christianity, one that is mythical and institutional, and one that is mystical and interior and brings healing and transformation to the human soul. In the mystical communion paradigm Christ is the Inner Light. The life long spiritual journey is intimate transformational relationship with the Inner Light of Christ., the Lumen Christi. The actualization of this relationship is the uniting our soul/consciousness with the Inner Light. In the mythical / institutional paradigm the historical Christ is the founder of Christianity as an institution. The life spiritual journey is one of affiliation with and loyalty to the institution of Christianity as mediator of the God relationship. One paradigm offers divinization and healing of the human soul through inner communion with God; the other offers redemption through a divinized institution as mediator of a mythical gulf between the human and the divine.
Consecration- Purification of the Heart and Prayer of the Heart
The tradition of spiritual practice that best actualizes the teachings of the communion paradigm of mystical Christianity is that of Prayer of the Heart or Contemplative Prayer. The desert monastic wisdom of earliest Christianity offers a diagnosis and a cure for the ills of the human condition. For the desert mothers and fathers the source of every spiritual ill is the condition of separateness and a dividedness of soul and our vital spiritual energies. Their prescription for the malady of the human condition they called “Purification of the Heart,” which is really a life long transformative process of contrition and conversion fed by interior communion with God in Prayer of the Heart leading to ever more deepening union of the soul with God. Through this life long praxis of Prayer of the Heart the core wound of separateness is healed and we come home to a life wholly consecrated to union with God through the inner Light and Fire of Christ within. Consecration then is both spiritual process and goal.
Awakened or not, our deepest longing, our deepest desire, is to give ourselves, all of our faculties and energies, to a Life and Presence that is utterly trustworthy, utterly loving, utterly essential, such that we could cast aside every other care or pursuit. For many those times of greatest soul accessibility to that point of conversion and commitment happen when we are most alienated and most discouraged. Such moments are points of great accessibility of the soul. Fortunately through grace early in life I experienced an opening to that interior Christ and discovered He was seeking me devotedly and passionately from within all the while I thought I was alone and separate. I simply needed to change direction and open my soul to receive the gift that was always being offered. That was the beginning of my journey into the consecrated life and that was the beginning of the “re-membering” of my spiritual life.
The word “consecrate” means -to make holy, to make sacred, to sanctify, to align what may be of the earthly or human order with the Divine Essence or Spirit. If we take this meaning even further, we adopt the premise that the Divine Essence is Love, Agape, Self-Giving, Self-Offering Love that seeks nothing for itself. This Divine Love is the root and ground of all existence, say the mystics of the great Wisdom traditions. Therefore the conscious spiritual journey for human beings is to awaken to that Holy Ground of being within us, and unify all of our human faculties and potential around the singular desire of Love Itself, seeking to become us, seeking to express Its very Essence in us. We may even say with some confidence that our deepest desire is God’s deepest desire, expressing Itself in us. In Consecration we give ourselves, the entirety of our being to our Greatest Desire to be united in love with the Source of our Life. Hence Consecration is the actualization, the Praxis, of the Great Commandment of Yeshua, to love God with our whole being.
If there is any “original sin” in the human condition, it is not some primeval offense committed by our ancestors whose effect is somehow inherited by us as punishment. Rather it is the sin of unconsciousness, of ignorance of our own truest nature as child of God and sanctuary of the Inner Light of Christ, and our own potential to realize it. Out of this ignorance we act out the unconscious, misdirected, and undisciplined energies and inclinations of our instinctual drives and predispositions, untempered and unguided by the purposes of Divine Love. We have been given the marvelous tool and faculty of the human brain in all of its complexity, and with all of its capacity for intellectual development and understanding. Yet by itself the brain, the thinking mind, and its creation, the egoic self, cannot discern or be guided by the ultimate purposes of Divine Love. The spiritual center or Heart, the sanctuary of the Divine at the center of the human soul, is the true organ of awakening and the desire to be given in love, to be at the service of Divine Love.
So it seems somehow that Divine Providence has brought into being the human species, whose destiny is to meld our psycho-physical, instinctual, mammalian make-up with the spiritual consciousness of soul, and Divine sanctuary of living spirit into a whole being, a new consciously loving Creation to walk this earth. We have been given the revelation and the gift of God’s Self Nature, Yeshua the Christ as the Personhood of this Divine Light and Fire that lives within us, seeking to pour forth the fullness of the Self-Gift of Love in us and through us. Yeshua awakens us from spiritual sleep, and in His Person within us we experience the Divine Beloved reaching into all Creation bringing us toward completion while we walk this earth to final completion in the banquet of the Divine Wedding feast where all Creation is united with Creator and Source.
The ancients of the desert tradition in Christianity had a simple formulation for consecration, for uniting the soul with the Christ Light and Fire within. For them the entire process was the “purification of the heart,” that is, uniting all of our inner life with the Divine Purpose of Love Incarnate. In this sense the Great Commandment of Yeshua, to love God with all of one’s being, and to love one’s neighbor as one’s very self is the simple formulation of consecration. And the simple (not easy) formulation of growth in prayer is to move from prayer that is mediated by thought, image, and words of speech, to prayer that is formless and a receptive inner communion opening to receive Christ’s gift of Self, and opening to our self-offering in love.
The formulation of prayer of the desert ancients was this: we pray to God in thoughts and images with the prayer of the mind, we pray to God with words in the prayer of the lips, and we open to receive inner communion with God in Christ beyond thoughts, words, or images, in direct experience in the Prayer of the Heart. Hence Prayer of the Heart is the door to the Consecrated Life, the Unified Life, through Inner Communion with Christ. And as St. Symeon the New Theologican (10th c) states it “We awaken in Christ’s body, As Christ awakens in our bodies,……………Where all our body, all over, every hidden part of it,is realized in joy as Him,….We awaken as the Beloved in every last part of our body.” (Mitchell, The Enlightened Heart, p.38)
We realize the Divine Beloved is the true Seeker and we are the Sought. In uniting with our truest deepest desire we unite with the Great Divine Desire and discover it is also our own deepest longing. Thus the journey of consecration becomes the journey of theosis (divinization), in the words of St. Paul “ I live no longer I, but Christ lives in me.”
“You are the peace of all things calm
You are the place to hide from harm
You are the light that shines in dark
You are the heart's eternal spark
You are the door that's open wide
You are the guest who waits inside
You are the stranger at the door
You are the calling of the poor
You are my Lord and with me still
You are my love, keep me from ill
You are the light, the truth, the way
You are my Saviour this very day.”
(Ancient Celtic Prayer- Carmina Gadelica)
