Sacramento Christian Community Newsletter, 06/20/2020

4. Inner Life

The following are points that have been extracted from the first chapter of the book of Friedrich Rittelmeyer ‘Meditation, a guidance of the inner life’. He develops the parallelism between the construction of a mediation and the Act of Consecration of Man. Even though the text in the book is much richer, we hope these points, like stepping stones in the process of meditation, may provide you with inspiration:

One may say frankly that a meditation is rightly constructed when its inward course is like the course of the Act of Consecration of Man.
Conversely, right meditation may be understood as an act of consecration performed not in the outer world, but in the world within, not in the community, but in solitude.
Let us first attempt to recommend a meditation, or, let us say, to indicate an effective content for the work of our quiet hours… We choose the saying form the Epistles of John in which Johannine Christianity is summed up: God is love, and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him.
Our aim is to attain the spiritual content of such a saying as strongly as possible within us for some time. We must first get beyond mere thinking round such a saying.

A. Jawlensky

In order to become inwardly sufficiently active, and yet not to lose one’s way in pure thinking, one may represent to oneself and try to repeat in one’s feelings, how this word shines out in the soul of the disciple John as a great revelation; how it is made living for him by the remembrance of that which he has experienced in Christ. This corresponds to the first part of the Act of Consecration of Man: the proclamation of the Gospel.
Now, we turn our attention more inwardly upon ourselves. The contemplation of pictures will help us keep the inward activity awake and living, for without inward activity nothing can be done. Let us represent this saying of John as a clear altar flame burning inwardly in our souls. Our whole being comes to the altar from all sides, and offers itself to this divine fire. We give to this fire our thinking, our feeling, our willing successively.
So we sacrifice our ego to the fire of Christ, and we try to listen to Christ saying to us: ‘I am love’, and we seek to gain a new ego from Him.
We seek to make this ego, illuminated by Christ, become so strong that it glows through three circles, first through ourselves, completely through our being and life, then through the whole circle of people among whom we live, and lastly, as far as possible, through the whole world.
If we succeed in doing this, we will make all kinds of discoveries. We will for the first time really discover what we could be and ought to be, and what we are not. We will find how far removed our whole being is from the Divine Being…and yet we could not have such an experience, nor could we bear it, if we did not feel within ourselves the power of another kind, which seeks to transform us, and that can transform us.
Out of the word of truth streams into us the force, the divine creative power, which makes another human of us. It is an incredibly slow process to change not only consciousness, but our whole being as well. One has the impression that one is working upon a stone, not with a chisel, but with water. But a human looks not at what he is, but at what she shall be, and feels that he is changing.
Then also, moments come when he really becomes one with such a word of revelation. For only in a holy moment the divine Word itself becomes his life. He receives the communion, and strengthened through it as through miraculous food, he returns into his earthly existence. We have experienced within us transubstantiation and communion as it is accomplished at the altar for the celebrating community.

5. Gospel Reading

John 4: 1-26

Now when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John, although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples, he left Judea and returned to Galilee. He had to pass through Samaria and thus came to a Samaritan town called Sychar, near the land given by Jacob to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there. As Jesus was tired from the journey he sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour, at noontime. A Samaritan woman came to draw water and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” His disciples had gone away into the town to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, “As you are a Jew, how can you ask me for a drink, as I am a woman and a Samaritan?” She asked this because Jews handle nothing in common with Samaritans. Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” She said to him, “Sir, you have nothing with which to draw water and the well is deep. From where do you have this living water? Surely, you are not greater than our Father Jacob who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as did his sons and cattle.” Jesus answered her and said, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water that I give will not thirst again. The water that I give will become in whoever drinks of it a spring of water, welling up as a source of life throughout the ages.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I no longer thirst and need not come here and draw it.” Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband and come here.” The woman answered, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “It is right when you say, ‘I have no husband,’ because you have had five husband and he whom you now have is not your husband. In this you spoke the truth.” The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain and all of you say that in Jerusalem is the place where there should be worship.” Jesus said to her, “Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know — for salvation and healing is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for so the Father seeks human beings to worship him. God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming, he who is called Christ; and when he comes, he will show us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I AM, the one

speaking to you.”

6. Contemplation

Odilon Redon

There was a time when human beings realized that the stars of the night sky provided a sure means of orientation on the surface of the earth, both on land and sea; this eventually led to what we call celestial navigation, which enabled the crossing of oceans, and ultimately, the successful circumnavigation of the earth.

While this knowledge of navigation was crucial, the prior discoveries of how to harness the wind with sails, and tillers and rudders with which to steer and without which one would be at the mercy of the winds, were equally important.
Humanity today is currently navigating an unprecedented worldwide storm in the global coronavirus pandemic, compounded here in the U.S. by strong currents and shoals of revealed endemic, systemic inequity, injustice and racism. The winds are strong and capricious, coming from every conceivable direction and the hope and possibility of soon reaching still waters, safe harbor, seems increasingly remote.
The unstable, contrary winds have been precipitated by the profusion of competing, conflicting “expert” witnesses as to the nature, source and resolution of our woes — the scientific, political and spiritual hypotheses of what is really happening. Our soul-sails are being blown hither and thither. These winds are not the wind of the Holy Spirit, but of the unholy spirits, which can engender in us worry, anxiety and fear.
In the ancient world celestial navigation was developed for the mastery of physical, geographical space. Today we need a new celestial navigation where we once again receive our orientation from the heavens, from above, but not outwardly, but inwardly, spiritually that we can properly navigate the realm of thoughts and ideas. And the Polestar of this new navigation is Christ Jesus, and all that belongs to what we call the Deed of Christ, and the love, compassion, mercy, and selflessness that flows from it. For Christ is the source of our inner strength, of our Self, our Ego, which is in us — tiller and rudder, that we can steer towards safe harbor in Him. In light of this, may we hear the prayer spoken three times before the priest’s communion with the wine, “O Christ, I confess unto that which is revealed through you, and the might of man’s adversary you take from me.”

Sanford Miller

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June 20, 2020
The Sacramento Newsletter
The Christian Community

Trinity

(St. John's tide starts June 24)

June 20, 2020 The Sacramento Newsletter The Christian Community

Trinity (St. John's tide starts June 24)

June 20, 2020
The Sacramento Newsletter
The Christian Community

Trinity

(St. John's tide starts June 24)