Contemplative Interbeing

https://contemplativeinterbeing.substack.com/

Sharing what we have enough of builds the relationships we need, while caring for the earth makes that sharing possible for others.

Where in your life has a simple gift made someone feel less like a stranger?

“Give up the weight of knowing, for the reverence of quiet attention”
— Christine Valters Paintner

The Serviceberries We Share We learn to measure so much of life by what can be bought, sold, or stored away.

Every spiritual path begins with a question about attention. Where do we place our gaze in a world crowded with distractions and with reasonable excuses for never coming home to our own souls? The simple act of showing up, intentionally, for the life of the soul is already the path. There is no separate moment when the journey begins. Whenever we turn toward what is most real in us, individually and together, we are already walking it.

From that starting point comes a distinction that has become essential to the movement of Interspirituality. Interfaith dialogue brings people of different traditions together to share what they love most about their own faith and to listen to one another with curiosity and warm, open hearts. This is precious work. Yet the interspiritual path asks for something further. It asks us to enter the practices of another tradition so fully that otherness itself begins to dissolve.

The word tolerance deserves some suspicion here. To tolerate someone implies a quiet condescension, as if one were graciously allowing for the quirks and missteps of a person whose path is lesser than one's own. Tolerance keeps the other at arm's length. It can be polite and even kind while still holding a subtle posture of superiority. The interspiritual heart has no use for that distance. It wants intimacy.

Chanting shows the difference clearly. One can study the history of Islam with real benefit, learning about the division between Sunni and Shia communities and about the Sufi orders that arose partly in response to more established forms of the faith. Such study is interesting and may even open the heart. But something else entirely happens when people sit together in a circle and chant la ilaha illallah with their breath and their bodies. Nearly every tradition makes use of this spiritual technology of sacred song. When we sing together, something shifts in the brain and in the soul. The boundary between us and them grows soft. We stop being Christians and Sufis and Jews and Buddhists and become human beings on fire with the desire for union with the divine.

This is a risk worth taking. In Christian language it might be called conversion, though what is meant is different from abandoning one faith for another. To be converted by an encounter with another tradition is to have one's heart opened to the beauty and presence of the sacred where one had not expected to find it. A Christian who chants the ninety-nine names of God does not stop being Christian. Something in that person has been widened, and the widening cannot be undone.

There are several ways to walk this road, and each deserves honor. Some people remain deeply rooted in a single tradition while staying open to the divine presence in many holy houses. They practice in those houses, feeling both the ecstasy and the historical pain that each one carries. This is what it means to be a mystic: to have a direct experience of the sacred wherever it shows itself.

Others, many of them young, describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. They hunger for experience of the sacred and remain suspicious of religion, often for good reason. Patriarchal forms of religion have been responsible for enormous suffering, oppression, and the justification of atrocity. People who hold that suspicion honestly are frequently interspiritual in the truest sense, drawing on many traditions and seeking to do so with depth rather than on the surface.

A third way has been called multiple spiritual belonging. There are seminarians preparing for Christian ministry who also keep the five daily Muslim prayers, and both paths live in them without conflict. There are people rooted in an ancestral Judaism who sit in Buddhist meditation, follow a Hindu guru, walk a Sufi path in the lineage of Rumi, and come through the Christian mystics to love Christ and Mary. Such a life might be described, with some humor, as spiritually non-monogamous. It is neither confusion nor indecision. It is a heart that has discovered it belongs in more than one house.

This inclination often grows from the soil of a particular place and upbringing. Some grow up where many ways meet, where Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and ancient Indigenous traditions live side by side and teachers from every direction pass through. A child raised there may be taught that all religions are equally true and equally valid, and may not meet a fundamentalist of any kind until adulthood. Coming to terms with the fact that many people believe their tradition alone holds the truth can take a long time. That naivety carries its own grace, though. It preserves an original sense of the sacred as abundant and widely shared.

Within the Abrahamic traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share a stream of teaching about love that flows in two directions. There is the mystical love of God, the call to love the divine with all one's heart and mind and with all one's body. And there is the love of neighbor and of the earth that becomes justice when it is lived out in community. These two currents cannot be separated. The mystical stream and the justice stream mingle, and each one is diminished without the other.

This teaching feels more urgent now than it did even a decade ago. Public discourse has grown so hateful that returning to the traditions' teachings of love seems close to a prophetic necessity. Love that remains private and interior has not yet finished its work. It must be activated in the world, among people, and with the earth itself.

Sometimes history makes this truth painfully concrete. Imagine a Jewish woman receiving Christian baptism, with waters carefully gathered from Ávila, from the Basilica of Guadalupe, from the Jordan River, and from the Pacific, and without being asked to surrender her Jewishness. Imagine that this long-planned ceremony falls on October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas attack on Israel, and that she fears at once that the response will be devastating and out of all proportion. Those gathered might choose to dedicate the baptism the way Buddhists dedicate the merit of their practice, offering it for the benefit of all beings. Such a moment becomes a living image of interspiritual reality, including its most painful dimension. The waters of several traditions mingle in one body at the very hour when the world is tearing itself apart along religious and national lines.

Speaking out against injustice committed in the name of one's own tradition can be an expression of love for that tradition. The prophetic core of Judaism calls its people to speak against injustice, and to raise one's voice, even with fear, is to stand within that lineage. Here the two streams meet again. Mystical intimacy with God does not excuse a person from the demands of justice. It intensifies them.

The same willingness to face difficulty rather than flee it belongs to grief. A mother who loses her fourteen-year-old daughter may notice something she never expected. The unbearable anguish of missing her child can feel remarkably similar to a longing for God carried since early adolescence. The two seem to occupy the same place in the heart.

Care is needed in saying this. Grief is not a gift to be patiently endured until its hidden meaning is revealed. Choosing to be present to grief is often less a matter of virtue than of having nothing left to protect. When what matters most is already gone, one might as well be present for the full catastrophe of it. In that presence, it becomes possible to detect a fragrance of the divine rising from the fire of loss.

Picture a forest fire. Grief burns down the landscape. The beautiful trees are blackened and flattened, and this is a real devastation. Then, because the trees are gone, a vista opens. Mountains and valleys and sky become visible where before there was only forest. Nothing about the fire is made less terrible by the view, and yet the view is there.

John of the Cross wrote of the dark night of the soul, and the phrase is often misunderstood. It is not simply a name for hard times. A divorce, a job loss, a frightening diagnosis, a profound bereavement are all painful, and they become a dark night only if we accept the invitation they carry into the unknown and into unknowing.

For John, the dark night is a process of radical unknowing. Everything we thought we understood about God and the spiritual life is stripped away, and he regards this stripping as grace. It arrives, he says, when God judges that we are mature enough to bear it. What is taken includes our concepts and also our feelings, including the comforting sense of connection to God. These attachments are layered over the soul and over our way of seeing. When they are removed, we become available for a naked and direct encounter with the Beloved, with love itself. As long as we hold ideas about how that encounter should look or feel, we cannot receive it.

This encounter has both an active and a passive side. The active side belongs to us. We cultivate a contemplative life through meditation and prayer, and we show up with intention. The passive side belongs to God. Once we have swept out the chamber of the heart, it remains up to the divine whether to reveal itself in a moment of mystical experience. Such moments are usually fleeting. They give us an oceanic taste of oneness and rescue us, briefly, from what Thomas Keating called the illusion of the separate self.

Perhaps the most freeing part of this teaching is that these moments of unitive love change us without fixing us, because nothing in us is broken. We are human beings living messy, imperfect lives, doing the best we can to be instruments of peace. The goal was never perfection or permanent enlightenment. The goal is to be touched, again and again, by the love that dissolves our isolation.

In the first shock of loss, every teaching and every practice may go out the window. Talk of mindfulness can enrage a person who can barely take the next breath. Talk of God's plan, heaven, or reincarnation can feel like an insult. None of it works. Only later does it become clear that years of contemplative practice have quietly done their work anyway. Practice teaches the nature of the mind. Thoughts, opinions, and aversions come and go and are not the final truth. We learn not to believe everything we think. And the mystics teach that in the darkness of not knowing, it is possible to rest in the arms of the Beloved.

This shapes the way we might accompany one another in loss. No one can offer a method for having mystical experiences in the midst of grief. What can be offered is companionship for those already sensing some sacred glimmer in the fire, who want to meet it with curiosity and tenderness. A true community of grief asks no one to justify their mourning or explain why they are still grieving. Great losses and small ones are equally welcome.

The terrain of loss is a wilderness no one can map for us. There is no correct route and no finish line. Yet certain features of the landscape recur, and recognizing them can offer refuge. One is the need for solitude, the moment when a grieving person simply needs everyone to leave so that she can be present to what happened. Another is outrage. Grieving people become furious at reality, at God, at the one who died, at themselves, at a doctor, at the policies of a government. This anger is natural and sacred. It is part of the path and no sign of failure. A third is yearning for God, a hunger for the divine that arises in the broken heart precisely because it has been broken. Few people know how to speak about this, and yet many experience it.

Writing can become prayer on this path, alongside poetry, song, and the voices of the mystics of every tradition. The underlying conviction is simple. Contemplative wisdom from across the world's religions has something to offer the grieving heart, and the grieving heart has something to teach the contemplative path.

The interspiritual path can also go wrong, and three challenges deserve naming. The first is intellectualism. It is possible to turn the encounter with other traditions into an academic project of becoming religiously literate. There is nothing wrong with learning, but if it stops there, even when accompanied by practice, it remains in the head and lacks the power to transform either ourselves or the world.

The second is superficiality. Some seekers sample the shiny and sugary pieces of many traditions without engaging their difficult and demanding parts. Someone may keep an image of the goddess Kali on the wall without understanding anything of the deep spirituality that gives Kali her meaning, then attend a ta**ra seminar and later a centering prayer weekend, always choosing what pleases and avoiding what challenges. Such picking and choosing does not nourish because it lacks substance.

The third is cultural appropriation. Many wisdom teachings arise from cultures that have been colonized, oppressed, and exploited. Western seekers, often white and often unconsciously entitled, can repeat that colonial pattern in the spiritual realm by helping themselves to whatever they like. How might we decolonize our spiritual lives? The answer begins with humility. We acknowledge, respectfully, that these teachings are rooted in particular cultures and histories. We name our teachers and, where possible, the lineages behind the practices we use. We refuse to claim these gifts as our own inventions or to profit from them carelessly.

None of these cautions is meant to make the path timid. Having named them, we can turn toward the heart and accept an invitation to a kind of holy recklessness. Let yourself go into the practices. Risk madness. The mystics were the God-intoxicated ones. That does not mean they lived in constant ecstasy, although sometimes they did. It means they allowed themselves to be undone by their encounter with the divine, wherever that presence met them.

That word, undone, may hold the whole of this teaching. The interspiritual encounter undoes the walls between traditions. Grief undoes the landscape of a life and opens an unexpected view. The dark night undoes our ideas and feelings about God so that love can meet us without disguise. Prophetic witness undoes the comfortable separation between private devotion and public responsibility. In each case, what falls away is something we mistook for safety, and what remains is closer to the truth of who we are.

For those who walk a universal spiritual path, this vision offers both challenge and consolation. It asks for humility toward the traditions and teachers who have shaped us, for a daily practice deep enough to hold us when every idea fails, for solidarity with all beings and the courage to speak for justice even when it costs something. And it offers the assurance that nothing in us needs to be fixed before we can be met by love. We need only keep showing up, keep sweeping out the chamber of the heart, and keep allowing the Beloved to find us in the fire, in the chant, in the circle of strangers who turn out to be kin.

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"How do we unravel someone else's ideas from the truth of who God is?
Great Spirit of Love, show us where to begin. Reveal to us what is Truth and strip away all that we have created in your image and likeness that does not serve you or our relationship with you."
—Felicia Murrell, AND: The Restorative Power of Love in an Either/Or World, p.189


A Moment of Reflection: What is one idea about God or Love that you’ve had to gently unlearn along your journey? 🤍

Harm becomes difficult to recognize when institutions make violence, greed, and dishonesty seem necessary, drawing ordinary people into their accepted ways.

Where do the words “necessary for the common good” make it harder for you to see the people affected by a decision?

“It’s the linking of action and contemplation, great work and deep spirituality, that keeps the goodness, rightness, beauty, and aliveness flowing.”
—Brian D. McLaren

When the Compass Shifts It is easier to see harm when it has a face.