Why So Glum?

Part Two: Christianity as an Ecstatic Tradition

In the last few decades, there have been thousands of studies and hundreds of books published with the goal of increasing happiness and helping people lead more satisfying lives. More people are in therapy, support groups, and mentoring relationships than ever before.

So why aren’t we happier? Self-reported measures of happiness have stayed stagnant for over the 40 years they have been researched. We don’t seem to be getting any happier, despite all our efforts. Most people would settle for just feeling a little better and don’t even consider the possibility of something even more significant such as ecstasy.

As Christians, do we think our Christianity makes us a lot happier? What about ecstatic? Unfortunately, most Christians will have a similar answer there. The author of Sacred Ecstasy, Bradford Keeney, says, “It is vitally important to acknowledge how spiritual ways too often and too quickly become emotion-less, motion-less, sense-less, heart-less, body-less, soul-less, spirit-less, mystery-less, and divine-less as they devolve from ecstatic embodiment to the abstract discourse of talking heads and the routines of ritual guardians.”

I want to focus on this deep, expansive, happiness and joy we call ecstasy, and how we might discover it once again in our Christian spirituality. Let’s begin by looking at how the Christian tradition began in riots of joy and mystical events of ecstasy—and then changed down through the centuries, sometimes evolving, sometimes regressing.

MysticismPaul SmithMay 24, 2020Ecstasy Comment

Taking the Lid Off God

Part One: Awakening Spiritual Energy and Ecstasy

As we have explored spiritual energy, it’s now time to consider the common outflow and experience of the presence of this energy: ecstasy. This powerful word often causes strong reactions in a variety of ways. Especially for us as respectable, well-mannered Westerners it might sound a little . . . extreme. It may arise apprehension, or maybe even discouragement as an unrealistic experience to hope for. Perhaps you feel perfectly satisfied with a quieter, more contemplative spirituality and ecstatic spiritual energy sounds a little too “out there.”

That may be your path and that’s ok. But it may also be only half of the story.

Spiritual practices of contemplative stillness are ultimately meant to bring us into a place of intimacy with the deep divine, into union with God, into a state of new life and being. The felt experience of this will often not be one of stillness, but be filled with energy, ecstasy, and bliss. We will find ourselves not just in the quiet, but in the experience, presence, and union with God beyond, beside, and being us.

Are experience, presence, and union with God the primary intentions of Christian spirituality? If so, is our spiritual practice leading us toward that realization? Could it be possible that our attachment to stillness is repressing the flow of spiritual energy which can be our awakening into the wholeness of integrated, embodied Christian mysticism?

MysticismLuke Healy & Paul SmithMay 17, 2020Ecstasy, spiritual energy Comment

Loving Evolution Together

Spiritual Energy Part 4

“Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other, so that the world may come to being. This is no metaphor; and it is much more than poetry.”
–Teilhard de Chardin

As we awaken to the spiritual energy within us, we find ourselves drawn more and more to the radial energetic dynamic, the drawing forward and further. This is no solo affair or hero’s journey. This radial energy “bundles.” It draws us together. It is the antithesis to the fragmentation, separation, and loneliness so pervasive today.

This attraction is not only for companionship but for the discovery and mutual expression of the evolving realities that are emerging in our midst. They more easily arise and can be discovered in a collective context. Even more, the community itself, the combining of energies, is instrumental to this movement forward.

The Social Action of Mysticism

Spiritual Energy Part 3

Mysticism is often seen in duality as an opposite to social action. There is the life of prayer and contemplation, alone in the closet, removed from the world. And then there are those who go out and get things done, help people, and change things.

Even if you don’t believe that harsh framing, perhaps you sometimes find yourself asking, “How can I navel gaze when the world is on fire? Shouldn’t I be doing something about it?”

So let’s consider it this way: How do you put out a fire?

Do you throw nearby cups of water onto the flames? No, you need more force than that, more resources. You need to connect down into the deeper source of continual water flow.

EvolutionLuke HealyMay 3, 2020spiritual energy, Teilhard Comment

Welcoming Embodied Christ Energy

Spiritual Energy Part 2

In part one, we explored living in the energy of Christ. Christ is the Christian symbol of the divine reality present in incarnation, in the whole of the material world. For us, this is an invitation to welcome a new reality of experiencing spiritual energy at the contact point between spirit and matter within ourselves. This is living in awakened consciousness in tune with the embodied presence of our physical being. This was the promise to the first followers of Jesus:

“You will receive energy when spirit (consciousness) comes upon you” (Acts 1:8).

And this is still something we can experience today, even more so! So how can we welcome this reality into our lives today?

Notice first the passive nature of this process at the start. It is primarily something we receive. It comes upon us by experiencing Christ in an inner experience or a personal transmission from another. After we welcome and receive it, then we begin to cultivate and share in it!

Practice, MysticismLuke HealyApril 26, 2020spiritual energy Comments

Living in the Energy of Christ

Spiritual Energy Part 1

“The energy of universal evolution, which, in the form of an innate pull toward being . . . an energy, the feeding and development of which is to some degree our responsibility.”
–Teilhard de Chardin

In our WeSpace groups, much of the focus of the practice is on the energetic dynamic of the experience. We talk about energy fields, the radiant heart center, strong feelings of love and bliss, the frequency and coherence of the group energy, and more. An unsuspecting participant might wonder how they got themselves into such a new age, woo woo experience. I thought these were Christian groups, after all!

In fact, dynamic energy is written all over the pages of the New Testament and seen in the life of Jesus and the early church. Actually, it’s not just seen, but in many ways is the central defining characteristic of what marked the early church gatherings and the ministry of Jesus: being in spirit (awakened consciousness).

MysticismLuke HealyApril 19, 2020spiritual energy Comments

The World in the Tomb

This is a strange Easter, no doubt about it. The day to celebrate resurrection this year is marked by separation, isolation, and underlying fear. People are dying, and the world as we knew it has gone underground. Some are mourning. Some are waiting with apprehension for what will come next. What will happen to our lives and to the way the world will be?

In many ways, this is not too different from the first the very first Easter morning for the followers of Jesus. While we generally try to celebrate the resurrection and get on to the part of the story where the tomb is empty and the Living Jesus has appeared, perhaps this Easter it makes sense to start as the disciples did. Let’s accept and the uncertainty of the moment.

PracticeLuke HealyApril 12, 2020Easter, evolution Comments

Letting Yourself Be Held by God

The Comfort of Being Held in Loving Space

Many of us are in isolation right now, some with our families and some by ourselves. Our physical separation from one another can be a real trauma, taking away a vital human need: touch. Did you know you can experience the touch of God, holding you in a loving embrace in this time of uncertainty and worry? It’s a great comfort. How might we experience that?

PracticePaul SmithApril 5, 2020being heldComment

Have you come yet to the end of your mind?

It is dusk in the information age. The sun has already set. Its time has passed. With the amount of information generated increasing to an unprecedented degree, it is not the end of information, but the flooding of its darkness. It’s become increasingly clearer and clearer that the answers to our problems do not come with more information. And yet we keep going, passing far beyond the point of information “overload” and into a reality of information enslavement.

Information is frequently referred to as the food of the brain. We believe that we need a continual influx of stimulation, often in the form of new facts and findings, ways to perform better or know more, as if these new learnings will give us the edge we need to succeed, or the sense we crave to make meaning of our lives, or simply to feel like a more productive or better person. We buy another book, listen to another podcast, read yet another article, excited about the prospect of learning something we didn’t know before.

The trouble is, the more we learn, the more we realize how much more we don’t know. And on further down the rabbit hole we go. Is it possible we are feeding the monster who holds us captive? The mind that always seeks to acquire more and more? Have we become addicted to the stimulation, without asking where it’s taking us?

PracticeLuke HealyMarch 29, 2020embodiment, development, Consciousness Comment

Disruption as Invitation — Discovering New Ways of Being

We are living in a time of great disruption. This pandemic is shutting down the world, closing business as usual—for both individuals and the systems that we are used to operating in daily. Especially in the early days of disruption, there is a desire for a return to normalcy. When we can breathe normally again and go back to the way things were.

There is uncertainty and insecurity. The way of the future can diverge in many different pathways and directions. The old path is the one our minds gravitate toward because it is the most familiar. We remember that which we miss. The unknown is much more daunting.

Last week we looked at the Jesus path through the pandemic for dealing with fear, disease, and the eventuality of death. This week, I want to consider how we might accept the gifts of this present time and look at how we can begin to imagine a different way ahead. Business as usual won’t work anymore. It wasn’t working before. Our way of life is not only killing the planet but is also keeping us from moving into the consciousness necessary to save it and ourselves.

EvolutionLuke HealyMarch 22, 2020Comment