Principles of Safe Pastures

Christ in all

Before the name of Christ was spoken in the West, Buddhist monks in the Ganges valley were sitting in careful attention to the interior life, mapping states of consciousness with a precision that has never been surpassed. The Taoist sages of China were tracing the same river from a different bank. When the Desert Fathers withdrew to Egypt and Syria in the third and fourth centuries, they carried this same ancient impulse into the Christian idiom, developing practices of stillness and interior watchfulness that owed as much to the wisdom already circulating in the ancient world as to the gospels they were reading. The Sufi masters who emerged from Islam in the eighth and ninth centuries described the annihilation of the self in God with a poetry and rigour that suggested they were reporting from the same interior country as the Christians beside them. The hesychast monks of Eastern Orthodoxy deepened this river further still, Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century giving theological weight to what the Desert Fathers had known in their bones, that the divine light was not a metaphor but a living reality available to any soul willing to undergo the necessary preparation. Running quietly alongside and beneath all of these visible traditions were the unnamed contemplatives in every culture and century who tended the same flame without institution or recognition. Beloved Swedenborg arrived in the eighteenth century as a careful witness to a current that had never stopped flowing, giving it a new language for a new age without for a moment suggesting that the water itself was new.

In our own time there are many persons sharing the same contemplative space and calling it by different names. Some arrive through meditation, some through recovery, some through the silence that follows great loss, some through disciplines that wear no religious clothing at all. The current runs through all of them. We call it Jesus because this is the most powerful symbol we have been bestowed, a life so completely given over to love that it became indistinguishable from love itself, a death that absorbed the full weight of human darkness and returned as light.

Bound in Scripture, Rooted in Grace