A New Christmas 2011 Message from Abba Willie
Dear Friends,
Advent is the four weeks before Christmas, November 27 — December 24. A time for seeking the dynamic simplicity that God and nature require for us to become Christened and united with all creatures large and small, wild and tame. God is not separate, but distinct; therefore active at the heart of all creation. This stunning revelation enables the Christmas child to say with the rest of us mad lovers: “With my body I thee worship.” The heart and soul of celebration is adoration.
At Christmas we should be adoring most of the time. Our gift to the Beautiful One is our own personal, passionate presence. These are luminous human qualities seldom if ever found in mobs, crowds, political brouhahas and church aggregations (as distinct from religious congregations and communities). At Christmas, silence and solitude are more urgent than ever. How else can we penetrate the Mystery and participate with brilliance and brio the positive, affirming life of the Cosmic Wiggle — my nickname for the Deity after watching a majestic, lovely caterpillar squeeze through cracks and crannies that I thought not even a breeze could penetrate. Well, that’s what God does and where he is — everywhere pulling saints out of both savagery and security, out of moralism into high moral acts.
“Happy Holidays” is a spectacular betrayal of Jesus and of one another. You want happiness? Then experience Christ the way we are captivated by a lover, in this case, the supreme lover. As J.D. Salinger, one of America’s most salient writers put it, “See Christ and you are a Christian; all else is talk.” Share that experience with others.. .say over and over “Merry Christmas.” A contagion of happiness. All else is spurious.
Advent is a liturgical season. Such seasons are, for millions of people, their primary source of education. The senses, the intellect and will become focused on “the one thing necessary”. All human means lead more directly to the end. We live more deliberately, moving with alacrity toward the fullness of life, divinized by love. Selfishness, the fundamental human disability, is replaced by holiness. In Advent, we become conscious of Christmas not just as an historical event but, even more so, of a radical mutation that is cosmic, concrete and planetary — the contemporary evolution of the Word or Eros made flesh; the amazing, glorious event began in a Bethlehem cave thousands of years ago.
Even more astonishing is the effect of that historical instance in everyone today who is willing to be moved by the same spirit, drawn by the same divine attraction and thus to follow — not imitate — but follow creatively the liberating way of life found nowhere else but in him. “The way, the truth, the life,” the manliest man the disciplined wild man, with an “anima” – larger and more tender than any woman’s. No wonder his followers were bedazzled by him — only him and other christmen ever since. Jesus became Christ and asked “the Father” to infuse us all with “the same grace” — to rid ourselves of enslavement to our surface activities, our preoccupation with jobs, with small pleasures, with trivia and tawdry distractions, with stupefying gobbledygook and fatuous inanities.
Break with the empire and its spurious hold on us. Live in the Kingdom. Where’s that? In deep, reverent relationship with all there is. Beyond categories and boundaries and shallow, mindless conformities. Keep asking: do my daily activities (means) connect me with the end, with the Ultimate? Do I experience a revolution of consciousness, a psychological transformation? Am I insightful, courageous and kind? if so, then I am a lover. And so Divine Christmas gifts abound, thanks to the lavish, interior way we meet and greet each other: The joyful result is intimacy, ecstasy and fecundity.
An extremely important beginning is to scrap now and forever the non-Christmas silly, secular greeting: “Happy Holidays” and return to our roots with a wild and wonderful greeting full of rapture and glory: “Merry Christmas”.
But it was inevitable. Who is capable of being merry anymore? And who dares face — let alone follow — the fierce and fiery Christ? Subverted (trivialized) Christianity is a lie. It dismisses Christ and instead preaches moralism, a mediocre system of salvation. What we desire and nourish is softness, richness, power and prosperity.
Read anything lately on economy? Yikes! Ever hear from a church pulpit a positive sermon on poverty? It means being so crazy about God that nothing else matters very much. Only these kinds of people can change the world. Weird but true — many of us take Donald Trump more seriously than we take God.
The Christmas we celebrate is sheer nonsense. It does more harm than good. It subverts the message, the wonder, the radical breakthrough, the terrible challenge of Word or Eros becoming flesh. We try to live without theophany and of course in doing so we subvert the evolutionary process.
Recently, at Christmas I went to chapel. There was a monk hovering the crib with a guitar in his hands and a song raising the rooftop. How perfect the musical prayer: “Come on Baby, light my fire”.
That is our basic cry. Personally, Advent is my favorite season. Though an upright bag of tripe, my goal in life has always been, and, framed by Spirit, will continue to be, an unflagging effort to keep love alive, cultivate intimacy, and foster purity.
It’s Advent, the beginning of the liturgical year, the celebration of the enfleshment of God and the divinization of man. The same spirit that was in Jesus, reconciling the world to Himself, now resides in us, fanning the divine spark into the living flames of love — the ultimate source of justice and peace.
When will we get it? The solution is realized, not in military exploits, but in mystical experience. Such an experience is not shallow, spooky or spurious, but earthy, earnest and strenuously energetic. It is also potentially universal. The failure to develop this potency accounts for social chaos and distorted human cultures. Human encounters, far from being divinely experiential, collapse into repetitive mechanisms of human routine, of mindless habits. We remain alienated from each other and disoriented toward the Ultimate. Means unrelated to the end manifest nothing.
Mere facts stagnate and stultify. Our talk shrinks into jabberwocky. Our noisy but trivial efforts to relate significantly are largely in vain. Until we learn to contemplate, to take a long loving look at the real; become much more open to change; and become awesomely, leisurely aware of the Ultimate; until then we remain sozzled vapid communication, while the sheer joy of communion escapes us.
Possession of the truth does not enlighten us; it inflates us. But when truth possesses us, we are enriched. Only then is the meaning of things, the heart of reality revealed. We see things as they really are — all things related. We behold the manifold in the One. Liberated from the flapdoodle, mystery lures us into a level of being beyond human calculation and the shallow life of the senses. Action without contemplation is blind. Talk without silence is cluttered, rebarbative. Psalm 46 of the Hebrew scriptures highlights insight: “Be still and see that I am God.” Since God is not separate, but distinct, the vision of the Holy One provides a worldwide perspective: the Cosmotheandric Presence.
Often I engage in self-guidance: “Do not say another word unless you mean it.” Wisdom literally means a taste for the right word at the right time, and the inclination to overlook what is unimportant. Living mindfully, relating wisely is how the Swiss hermit, Giles, described it: “Going to a wedding, or going to war.” Yes, of course — both.
To my faithful friends, I am wedded. The bond is unbreakable. At war, too, against pietism, moralism and that fundamental human disability, selfishness.
It is more possible to befriend people when activated by a living tradition, rather than incarcerated by the Democratic and Republican parties. An important part of being is sharing — that is, relating wondrously to others, to all creatures; and adoringly to the ineffable other. The most theologically correct word for living together, mindfully and joyfully in the sacred presence, is erosphere. With roots in the Ultimate, the agony and ecstasy of contemplation — a life lived deliberately — it is not only endurable, but screamingly enjoyable.
To live is to explore, and to discover boundless meaning — manifestations beyond our measurements, calculations and legalisms. These three capricious compulsions constitute a pseudo-spiritual life — a popular, superficial devotion, a nicely misguided bit of pious pomposity.
Are we being transformed into a Christ of this century or not? Do our means reach to the end — holiness? Is our job more consuming than prayer? Are we driven by routine, by social conventions, by a little religion; or in its place an egotistic “spiritual life”? Or rather, do we know what it feels like to be alive? Am I in pain over the chaos of this world and fascinated by beauty: The presence of God felt in the desert and in the hurly-burly of the world?
What a pleasure it is to witness sacred acts in a secular world. The bishop asked me why I called our hermitage hill “holy”. My response: Because sheep graze there. Teilhard de Chardin wrote: If I had to choose between my treasured rock and my image of God, or even my concept of the cosmotheandric deity, I’d choose the rock.
On a street corner in Boston, a prostitute approached me. We chatted for ten or fifteen minutes. I was in civvies, she in her work clothes. We discussed the Incarnation. I left her feeling more Christ-like than ever. Her farewell took me by surprise. “Goodby, Father,” she said. How did she know? I paused and asked her. “We always know,” she said. “In fact we offer ten percent off. But I offered you my soul instead.”
A missionary, in a foolish attempt to explain the difference between consecrated vs. unconsecrated bread, devoured the former with awe and reverence, while stomping the latter underfoot. The natives who witnessed this unfortunate act wept over the profanation of the unconsecrated — but to them, utterly sacred — bread.
Yesterday I entered the room where my three cats were sleeping. The sacred silence, the holy feline presence of God, overwhelmed me. I spent the night there; drawn by a divine cat, called into a mystery we dumbfoundedly call prayer. Of course, as the first hermit, St. Anthony, said: “One prays best who doesn’t even know he or she is praying.” Like the prostitute I encountered in Boston; the lovers in visceral, madcap congress; the politician who tells the truth; the teacher, preacher, artist and musician who hit the target; the carpenters and stone masons who make beautiful things; the farmers who nourish them; the actors who elaborate them; the doctors who heal them; and all the caretakers of reality who are the transforming instruments of the divine-human exploration into the Ultimate.
But enough; my time is up. Soon it will be ultimately over (but up for now, because I have to micturate — an inconvenience caused by my medications.) How droll! The delightful delirium of the deeps perhaps. We are all tired of lucubrations, however luminous, so maybe a few secrets of the real, discovered not by more frenzied mental work but by intuition and delivered not by loquacious demonstrations but by monstrations — a surge of glory, a burst of truth, an act of love.
Come my Love, my Lord enliven me or I shall perish.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
Abba Willie McNamara
SLI, P0 Box 2354
Borrego Springs, CA 92004
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