Thursday

Attachment. Greed. Addiction.

Previewing his latest Shift Network series of teachings, Neil Douglas-Klotz, Saadi Shakur Chisti, says this:

“The Last Supper is in the middle of a, you could say, a long story where Yeshua is trying to get his students to orient themselves to their own inner connection to what we would call guidance today, their high guidance, when he’s gone. They’re dependent on him at the time of the Last Supper, so he tries to disengage them from this over-dependence. And we find this in many spiritual traditions, that the students often become overly attached to the teacher, and the teacher has to basically liberate them, to find their way for themselves.”

In the section of John’s gospel appointed for today, we find:

”…Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world… Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

Later, after the foot washing and the glorified and the you don’t understand now but you will, etc. it says:

“Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews I say now to you, ‘Where I am going you cannot come.’ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, so also you should love one another.”

Much of Saadi’s teaching about Jesus’ teaching is about connection. The small self connects to the Big Self. The individual I to the invisible I, the only I AM. It’s all about the connecting.

In the heart. The connection is realized in the heart.

I treasure Neil’s insistence on felt practice, the breathing, the singing and moving, the kind of consciousness that recognizes the connection.

And yet. The connection language ‘doesn’t work’ well in my experience, and I’m tempted to label it heady and maleish. An unfortunate translation?

More fitting to my experience is part/whole imagery. Vine/branch. You don’t have to connect (which seems to demand a former separation) because you’re already a part of. I am a part of (like a single cell of) a part of (like an organ) a body.

My church friend Juan Oliver posted an Easter sermon in which this phrase appeared:

“… to be born again from God in the font, our grave and our mother.”

There’s no unpacking such a bunch of words, the poem’s promise. That’s an Easter sermon, after all, and it’s only Thursday.

Attachment. Greed. Addiction. When there’s anything we ‘can’t live without’ we are stuck in desperate loss. Not the ‘except a corn of wheat fall into the earth and die’ kind of loss, but the wasted life of holding ‘our own’ at any cost.

What you must do, do quickly.