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Seeking One’s True Self at the Altar

“Philosophy of Freedom #8” by Laura Summer

In the Sunday Service for the Children, we hear that we have come to earth to learn and to work. We hear that human life becomes desolate without enlivening force of love in our work. We hear that Christ is love’s Teacher. For the children, a direction and focus for any life is gently indicated—learning to develop love as a capacity.

One can see the communion service for adults, the Act of Consecration of Man, as an extension of the path suggested in childhood. For, by its very nature, this Act is an offering of self to God. We offer our purest thoughts, our heart’s love, and a will devoted to Him, to Him who is the very essence of love. We perform an act that He asked us to do in memory of Him—the offering in gratitude of substances of earth—bread, water, wine, to our Father, so that He can be present in them.

We bind our noble thoughts, feelings and devotion to the substances that we, too, are offering, noting that we do so in connection with the working of the Trinity. We pray that the Son God be the creative force in us. We pray for the gift of the creating fire of love.

Christ comes to dwell in them, to concentrate His power in them, in such a way that, through taking in His substances in communion, we can take the creating fire of His love as well, and He can be present in us. He, whose whole life was Love incarnate, sacrifices Himself ever and again for our well-being, for the nourishment and strengthening of the creating power of love in us. Christ dies again and again. But He, the essence of Love, rises again in the hearts of those who give Him a dwelling place.

Our truest, deepest self, our true being, resides in this capacity to develop creative love. Our true self is capable of transforming our narrow egotism into a broader concern for the furtherance of the world. This capacity exists in us as potential, as a seed planted in us by God. At the altar, in any of the sacraments, but especially in the Act of Consecration of Man, this potential to develop love, the characteristic of our truest self, is nurtured and strengthened.

Paul says, ‘your life is now hidden with Christ in God’. Col 3:3 Our true being, our true creative potential, resides with Christ. At the altar we practice offering ourselves to Him in love, taking Him into our selves. At the altar, we are nurturing and developing the life of our true self, with His help. For our true self is Christ, creating Love, in us.

September 16, 2011/0 Comments/by CCNA

Essays and Articles

God Becomes Perceptible in the Sacraments

The sacraments are liturgical acts performed by the community, in which the working of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy, Healing Spirit can become visible and audible.

In the Baptism, substances of water, salt and ash are re-united with their original power. They are brought into relationship with the qualities of the Father’s substance, the Son’s renewal, and the Spirit’s light. These regenerated substances are then inscribed on the head and breast of the child, that heaven and earth may come together in a fruitful way in his or her life.

In the Confirmation, we see and hear Christ’s intimate companionship on the young person’s individual path of life; He brings light, power, guidance and comfort.

In the Sacrament of Consultation, the renewed confession, we can hear the words of Christ, in Whose heart the red threads of all human destinies are joined. He encourages us to learn to offer and to receive.

In the Act of Consecration of Man, the communion service, Christ becomes visible in the elevation of bread and wine, transformed into His Body and His Blood, vessels of His Life. He becomes audible in His prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, and in His promise of peace.

In Marriage, the couple’s decision to join two lives together is strengthened in a way that creates the space for a third entity. This space is a place where Christ can appear, as His loving power of sacrifice.

In the Sacraments around death—a Sacrament of Consultation, a Communion and an Anointing— Christ accompanies our crossing of the threshold between earthly life, and the life after earthly life. We hear the words He speaks to His Father the night before He dies, His prayer for us. He opens the eye of the soul to life after life.

In the Ordination of Priests, embedded in the Act of Consecration of Man, the power to celebrate all the sacraments is conferred as a gift from the divine world. The candidate’s soul forces of thinking, feeling and willing are linked to the Trinity, so that the words and actions of the Trinity, and Christ especially, can be conveyed to the congregation in the sacraments.

September 16, 2011/0 Comments/by CCNA

Essays and Articles

Finding One’s True Self at the Altar

Spiritual seekers of all traditions and times strive to access a realm, which lies beyond our everyday reality. Often the entry into this realm is connected with an altered or extended experience of the self. A transformed self-consciousness goes hand in hand with an understanding of the spiritual world. Accordingly living with the Act of Consecration of Man and the other sacraments of the Christian Community very often gently changes over time the relationship to the world and to our selves. Our understanding of the spiritual is deepened. What is happening at the altar and in our communities that allows this to take place?
Before we can answer this question it might be helpful to look at other traditions and their way to change the experience of the self. Following old teachings the Zen master Guishan Lingyu asked his pupils to contemplate a riddle:

“Tell me in one word what your original being was before your parents gave you birth and prior to your capacity to discriminate things.”

In their effort to answer, the students will be led back in time to the origins of their existence. Questions like this might come up: Where were we before we started thinking? Where were we before we received a physical body? Did your experience of the self exist before you were born?

Going back to the origins in the described way can bring us to a point where we might feel that our individual every day thinking does not lead us anywhere but into nothingness. We might conclude that going back in time we did not exist at all as an individual self; or that we were an unidentifiable integral part of a “great cosmic consciousness” before we were born. As a result the experience of our self may be perceived as a transient illusion, which will not lead us to higher knowledge.

Another way to gain a new relationship to our selves is, not by going back to our origins like the Buddhist teacher suggests, but by being aware of our selves in the present moment. The contemporary spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle describes this as a life changing personal experience:

“For years my life alternated between depression and acute anxiety. One night I woke up in a state of dread and intense fear, more intense than I had ever experienced before. Life seemed meaningless, barren, hostile. It became so unbearable that suddenly the thought came into my mind, “I cannot live with myself any longer.” The thought kept repeating itself several times. Suddenly, I stepped back from the thought and looked at it, as it were, and I became aware of the strangeness of that thought: “If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me – the I and the self that I cannot live with.” And the question arose, “Who is the ‘I’ and who is the self I cannot live with?”

Tolle describes how with this experience of an “observing uninflected self “ his “unhappy everyday self” collapsed and stopped to play the major role in his life. He calls the newly found liberating entity in himself the “I AM”.

In this spiritual experience the suffering “everyday-self” becomes a stepladder to a new awareness of a second self, which is always there. It was just not perceived before. The “lower self” starts to acknowledge the “higher self” as a living reality and authority.

Initially in a very similar way the Sacraments can promote a transforming experience. Central is here the celebration of the Act of Consecration of Man. This is a collaborative happening, in which everybody present is equally invited to engage in the process by being fully there, with all senses, awake in the present moment. The foundation of the Act of Consecration is a sensual experience, honoring the presence of our so-called “lower self”. But when the first words are spoken another layer is added to our participation: “Let us worthily fulfill the Act of Consecration of Man…” The participant will soon realize that this is a challenge. Distracting thoughts come and go; the feeling of tiredness can be overwhelming. But if the will and interest is there to contribute to the service actively than sooner or later a living awareness of the self will develop which is comparable to the experience of Eckhart Tolle. One can realize that there are “two of me” – “the self which distracts itself” and “the self, which can tune in, which feels perfectly at one with what is said.” This realization might be accompanied with the feeling that through attending the Act of Consecration inner turbulences are calmed down and a growing sense for one’s owns life direction is developed. This is because- like Tolle – we consciously or unconsciously also start to live more intensely with the question: “Who is the I? The true self? And the Act of Consecration of Man starts to offer answers. The perception of our lower self, our higher self and the being of Christ start to merge in our experience. That can be very inspiring because it gives us ideas about our future as humanity and individuals. Where are we going? What am I called to do? So instead of leading us solely to the origins of our existence all sacraments invite us to see the future aspects of human evolution as well. We engage in a process in which we are allowing our every day consciousness to have a conversation with the eternal in us.As observers of this conversation we learn to embrace and to nourish in us the Christ consciousness, which lives in the renewed sacraments.

This inner conversation can be further deepened in the Sacrament of Consultation.

Lindy Lee, Sources of the Self, 2006
mailto:oxley9@rslynoxley9.com.au, oxley9@rslynoxley9.com.au

See Original Teachings of Ch’an Buddhism [trans. Chang Chung-Yuan] Pantheon Books, New York 1969, p. 219.

Source online: The Present Moment and the End of Suffering with Eckhart Tolle

September 16, 2011/0 Comments/by CCNA