REBIRTHING of GOD - JP Newell

THE REBIRTHING OF GOD

Christianity's Struggle for New Beginnings

by John Philip Newell

     

     I can usually count on son Luke to stick a 'used, but new to me' book in my stocking at Christmas.  Often it arrives just as I am ending my Advent-Christmastide devotions and in search of something new.  I especially relish the fact that Luke has usually read the book first and made notes and comments in the margins.  It is a special way to connect with each other nonverbally!  

     I have been a fan of John Philip Newell for years, ever since a friend gave me a small book of Celtic prayers by the author.  I kept that book by my bedside and often referred to the morning and evening prayers of Iona.  That book introduced me to the monastery on the Scottish isle and helped me rediscover my roots in Celtic Christianity.  While my father was a strong advocate for the established church, I know deep within him the threads of spirituality of the divine in nature were woven.  

     We are at a turning point in the history and existence of our faith.  The church as it currently functions is dwindling, the world is divided along geographical and spiritual lines - divisions that God did not intend, that the world cannot support.  We need a rebirth, a renewal of who we are in relationship to God, to each other, and to our world and ALL its creatures.  We are literally killing ourselves and our home with our stubborness to adhere to our rightness, with our overwhelming focus on differences rather than relationships and unity.  

    I am excited to begin turning the pages of Newell's book and ponder rebirth, while praying each morning for those around me and the world.  I will attempt each day to summarize the essence of a section of book with a haiku - a practice of writing taught by my cousin, Lorrie Tom.  The 17 syllables (ok, sometimes I cheat a little) force one to concentrate on what is critical to express a thought.  Brevity! (Important after this long-winded introduction!)

INTRODUCTION

• What does it mean to say that we are made OF God rather than simply BY God?
• Rebirthing of God points to a radical reemergence of the Divine from deep within us. We do not have to create it. We must let it spring forth and be reborn in our lives.

• Christ’s body was not found where it was laid. The story is not about resuscitation, but about resurrection: finding new form, forever unfolding into what has never been before. (xiii)
• To return or to reconnect is not to suggest that the answer lies in going back to something that WAS. It is an invitation to listen and equip us to move forward into new beginnings we may not yet even be able to imagine.

  

  Background Photo: Kalispell sunrise

• May we grow in awareness and commitment for they hold the promise of rebirth. (xvii)

CHAPTER 1  

RECONNECTING with the EARTH

• We are made in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26)...a primary feature of such rebirthing is the desire to move back into relationship with everything else that is of God. (1)

Background Photo: ice drippings from shrubs

The Cathedral of Earth, Sea and Sky

• Our holy gathering spaces must not be characterized by division from the creatures and from earth’s other peoples and religious traditions. (3)
• Everything is conceived by the Spirit in the womb of the cosmos. Everything is sacred. (3)
• Whatever our sacred sites are, we must ensure that the language we use, the rituals we celebrate, and the symbols we employ keep pointing to the great living cathedral of earth, sea, and sky. (5)

The Whole Universe Takes Part in the Dance

• Within the flow of the universe, everything is interrelated. (6)
• All things of creation yearn to move together in a dance of relationship and harmony. (7)

• Will we speak from self-contained places such as communities and religious traditions or will we choose to speak from the open place of relationship with the earth and all its creatures? (8)

At the Heart of the Matter Is the Heart of God

• Not only is the universe sacred, it holds within itself a magnetism of unity. (9)
• “The more I give myself to the earth, the more I belong to God.” (Teilhard,9)

• Oneness with the Divine, Christianity’s greatest goal, should be experienced not as looking away from the earth but as ‘communion with God through earth’ (10)
• We must ‘let the very heart of the heart...beat within us’ (Teilhard, 10)

A Spirituality of Intimacy with the Natural World

• We need to move from a spirituality of alienation from the natural world to a spirituality of intimacy with the natural world. (Berry, 11)
• Responsibility for the degradation of the earth is not to be laid solely at the door of Western Christianity, but we have been complicit in the crime. (11)
• Thomas Berry said that we are living in a moment of grace. By that he means that we are living in the midst of an awareness of earth’s oneness, the likes of which humanity has never known before. We are experiencing a way of seeing that is vital to the healing of the earth. The question is whether we will translate this seeing into action, whether we will apply this awareness to the holy work of transformation. But as Berry went on to say, moments of grace are transient. They are passing. In other words, will we meet this moment or will we miss it? (13)

Chapter 2

Reconnecting with Compassion

• What are the crossroads of our lives and our world today, the critical junctures at which we stand? How do we know which way to turn? (15)

• Chapter focuses on teachings of Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of non-violent movement for democracy in Burma.

A Revolution of the Spirit

• True power comes from within. Hatred blinds us to the wisdom in our soul. (16)
• Notice the similarity between the word compass and the word compassion. An early compass was used to determine the relationship between two points. Compassion is about honoring the relationship between two people or groups and remembering those who suffer (17)
• Compassion is about making the connection between the heart of my being and the heart of yours, and following that connection. (17)
• Threefold path of compassionate way: courage to see, to feel, to act. (17)

The Courage to See

• Compassion is about seeing that the rights of others are ‘as important as defending one’s own susceptibilities and rights’ (Kyi, 18)
• Through compassion we move from ego-centrism to ex-centrism. (18)
• To WANT to bear responsibility for the needs of others is a blessing. It frees us from our narrow self-interest. (19)

• The great challenge is to see our connection with those who seem different from us. (19)
• The greatest obstacle to compassion is not hatred. It is habitual patterns of narrow self-interest. (20)

The Courage to Feel

• Like a mother caring for her only child, says the Buddha, so we are to care for one another. (20)
• There is a direct relationship between allowing ourselves to truly feel and the decision to act. Compassionate action is sustained by the courage to feel. (21)
• Feeling as the very innards of our being flow with compassion...being moved in our guts. (22)
• Do we know that we carry within us for one another the blessing of God? Do we know that the springs of compassion deep with us can flow again? (23)

The Courage to Act

• “Love is an action, not just a mind state.” (kyi 23)
• The challenge when it comes to compassionate action is that it is costly. The see and feel is easier, the call to action is usually the sticking point. (24)
• Sometimes the problem with action is that we become overwhelmed by the complexity of what needs to be done in our lives and our world, but the sheer amount of mess and even chaos within us and between us. (27)
• Practice profound simplicity. Don’t get so caught up in the complexity of detail that the essence – the compass connection between you – becomes blurred. (26)
• Don’t just stand there despairing. Do something. Just start somewhere. (26)
  

  
• “I stopped waiting for the world to improve and exercised my right to intervene in that world.” (Havel, 27)

• No single one of us is all-important, but each one of us is essential. No one else can play OUR role of compassion. Do we believe this? (28)

CHAPTER 3

Reconnecting with the Light

Turn But a Stone, and an Angel Moves

• The Hill of Angels, the Machair, on Iona is a place of extraordinary light. (29)

• In the Celtic world the gateway to heaven is present everywhere – in every place is the immediacy of heaven. (32)
• George MacLeod spoke of Iona as a thin place – a place in which we sometimes see briefly through the veil that separates heaven and earth. (32)

• Iona is not a place to cling to, or escape to, but to cherish as a place in which our seeing is renewed, so that when we return to the demanding and conflicted places of lives and our world we do so with open eyes that have been refreshed. (32)

The Light at the Center of Every Cell

• Mary Oliver is one of the great prophets of Light in our modern world. She speaks of “the light at the center of every cell”…..the Celtic world celebrates this as the Light within all life. (32)
• The Light of God is the Essence of all things. Everything originates in the Light of God. (Eriugena,33)
• God is the Light that flows through all things, like a subterranean river running deep in the folds of the universe. K White calls is the ‘glow flow’ (33)
• What we are called to do, says White, is not just look at the flow or analyze it, but know that we are part of it and dive more deeply into it.

• Move from awareness into open-eyed wonder, and from awe to prayers, and from prayer to adoration. (Oliver, 33)
• In the Celtic world the gateway is present everywhere. In every place is the immediacy of heaven. In every moment we can glimpse the Light that was in the beginning and from which all things have come. (34)
• Divine Light is within matter. It is to be found not by looking away from the earth but by looking within everything that emerges from the earth. (35)
• Hidden within the mundane is the Divine. What we do to matter, therefore, all of this relates to the Light that we worship in the Christ Child. (36)

Be Filled with Light and Shine

• Find your Light temple….sitting attentively by an open window looking to the east as the sun rises with its first light...we remember why we have come into the world, “to be filled with light, and to shine.”

• 

  Background Photo: High Country Lane sunrise

  We have a sibling relationship with everything that exists and the Light we glimpse in another is also the Light that shines within us. (38)
• When we truly shine, and when we work for the true shining of every child, woman, man, and creature, we find that sometimes we create discomfort in the people around us and in the holders of power in our communities and our world. (41)
• The shadow side of power is a determination that only some should shine...identification with the poor is a threat to those in power. (38)
• No longer can we afford to deny the Light that is in our sibling species and in the matter of earth’s resources. It is the Glory at the heart of me, you, and all things. (40)

Letting Go to the Light

• We cannot confuse the Light with our egos or cling to its manifestations.
• To live in this world… you must be able...to do three things: to love what is mortal,… to hold it… against your bones knowing… your own life depends on it,… and, when the time comes to let it go,… to let it go. (Oliver 40)
• We are to remember we are messengers of a Light that precedes us and a Light that will continue to flow long after us… (41)
• The Light is here and now. The gateway is all around us and within us. We are to love the Light and keep giving ourselves to it. (42)

Chapter 4 
RECONNECTING with the JOURNEY

• Our true well being will be found in relationship, not in isolation.
• The historic religions of the world are given not to compete with each other but to complete each other. (43)

• One of the primary features of the rebirthing of God is reconnecting with wisdom, allowing the truth that has been etched into our being to come forth in new ways.(43)

Journeying into Unknown Territory

• The motif of journeying towards new beginnings can be found as early as the book of Genesis: ‘Go to the land that I will show you...’ Gen 12:1 (45)
• In the ‘microphase’ of a new religion, the blessings are primarily for those who come within its boundaries (like a newly planted sapling that requires protection in order to grow) (46)
• In the ‘macrophase’ a religious tradition can offer its blessings freely to the world. It is time for Christianity to enter its macrophase. (46)
• Hindu ‘Nasmaste’ has been freely shared: The Divine in me honors the Divine in you. You don’t have to be Hindu to use the phrase!
• We need to give away freely to the world as Christians and we need to receive from humanity’s other great religious traditions. (46)
• What does Christianity have to offer? Awareness of the earth’s sacredness, vision of nonviolence, practices of compassion.

Background Photo: Elkhorn Peak morning

Traveling as Pilgrims

• Being a pilgrim means entering another culture not only to offer from your gifts, but to deeply receive the gifts of another.
• How different our Christian history might have been if we had journeyed as pilgrims toward the people and religious traditions of other nations. (47)
• Native Americans must truly wonder how different the Western world would be if European missionaries had come expecting to find Light in Native traditions. (47)
• We cannot undo the tragic wrongs that have been done in the name of Christianity...we can, however, be part of a new beginning. We can allow the true essence of our Christian inheritance to be born anew. (48)
• There is a tendency in the West to absolutize our religion. Instead of viewing it as a road sign that points beyond itself, we consider it a stop sign. It becomes the destination, the end. (50)

• How can we cherish our religious inheritance – its symbols and sacraments – and at the same time let go of it within ourselves? (51)

Shedding Our Attachment to the Ego

• Western culture and traditions has made us strong in the realm of thought and ideas, but weak in the ability to access silent meditation and wordless prayer. (53)

Background Photo: by Eth Carr - sunrise on Elkhorns

• We are all strong in the Western world in our religious ego. But we are on the verge of collapse. We need to do the work of dying to the way in which our ego claims to be the center, rather than serving the Center. (55)

Finding the Other Half of Our Soul

• If we pretend that our central trunk is all that we need, if we refuse to grow by sending out secondary roots into the wisdom of other traditions and other nations, we will become not stronger but weaker. (53)

• To truly carry blessing for the world, whether as individuals or together as religious traditions, we are invited to move into new lands of awareness and wisdom. There we will FIND blessing and we will BECOME blessing for one another. (57)

CHAPTER 5

Reconnecting with Spiritual Practice

• One sign of rebirthing in the lives of Christians AND those who do not identify with any particular religious tradition, is a reconnecting with spiritual practice.
• Seek signs of the relationship between contemplation and action, silence and expression, solitude and relationship.

• Essential rhythms of earth’s cycles and seasons must be heeded. 

A Contemplative Orientation

• We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time – in people and in things and in nature and in events. But the problem is we don’t see it. (61)
• Spiritual practice is not seeking to know ABOUT God but to KNOW God!
• When Nietsche said God is dead, he was saying our experience of God had died in which Western Christianity had focused its attention not on spiritual practice but on spiritual belief.
• Spiritual practice is not about an idea or concept of God...it is about seeking the experience of God’s presence. (62)

Background Photo: Labyrinth at Ghost Ranch Conference Center, NM

• There is a place for attempting to articulate what we believe about God and to do this together in the context of past articulations and Christianity’s unfolding history of beliefs. But these definitions of faith should be kept on the back shelves of the Christian family’s library and not by the front door as a requirement for entry. (64)
• It is spiritual practice that will again and again enable us to experience the Sacred at the heart of life in ways that will shape how we live and undergird how we work to heal the world. (65)

Finding Our Diamond Essence

• Merton believes spiritual practice is about remembering our diamond essence – what is deepest in us is OF GOD! (64)
• In Spiritual practice, we return to this deepest center, we penetrate the innermost ground of our life, finding true meaning from within, not from the outside. (65)
• Contemplative prayer is essentially a listening in silence, an expectancy.
• The problem with truth is not that it is too complicated for expression. It is too simple for expression ‘too deep for daily tongues to say’. (67)

Plunging Deep into the Heart of the World

• The same diamond essence within us is in everybody and in everything.(68)
• We are being called to a new monasticism in which we are not closed in or cut off from the earth and the struggles of the world, but open both to the glory and the brokenness that are in all things. (68)
• Spiritual practice is about being turned completely inside out. It is to discover that our true center is the Self at the heart of one another. (70)
• The deepest ground of our being cries out for communion. The unity for which we long, is not a new unity. It is our original unity. We do not have to create our relationship with all things. We simple need to let it be born again in us. (71 Merton)

Nurturing the Seed-Force for Change

• Access your diamond essence in order to be strong for the work of transformation in the world. (71)
• Respect the self and nurture it in others. (71)
• The work of inner change, dying at a certain level in order to live at another, is essential.
• We are most free when we do not lift ourselves up over one another but when we remember that our true Center is at the heart of one another. (72)
• Spiritual practice is a cosmic dance in which we discover that we do not have to take the lead, but simply give ourselves to the dance. (73)

CHAPTER 6

Reconnecting with Nonviolence

• We must reclaim non-violence as the deepest and truest energy for creating and sustaining peaceful change in the world
• Iona, a holy site of pilgrimmage and associated with peacemaking, is grounded in an awareness and experience of the violence that humanity is capable of.

Background Image: Monk's Strand beach, Iona - site of a massacre of monks in 806 CE by Norse invaders.  Even peaceful Iona is marked by violence. 

Prayer for rebuilding of Iona: (MacLeod)

It is not just the interior of these walls,

It is our own inner beings You (are renewing)…

We are Your temple not made with hands.

We are Your body

If every wall should crumble, and every church decay,

We are Your habitation…

We bless You for this place…

But take us ‘outside the camp’ Lord

outside holiness,

out to where soldiers gamble,

thieves curse and nations clash

At the cross-roads of the world…

So shall this building continue to be justified. (78)

Response-Ability

• George MacLeod, founder of modern Iona community, was without a doubt the most aggressive pacifist the modern world has known.(76)
• The role of a prophet in both word and action is to raise questions about how we view ourselves and about the assumptions by which we live and act. (76)
• There is a strong connection between commitment to the way of Christ and commitment to peacemaking. (77)
• The great offering of Christ to humanity was not about salvation FROM the world, but rather salvation OF the world. WHOLE salvation not SOUL salvation. (78)
• We have the ability to respond to the injustices and violence of our nations and our world – we have a RESPONSE-ABILITY to do so. (79)

Love-Force Not Brute-Force

• Mahatma Gandhi, modern world’s great prophet of non-violence, led a movement in early 1900’s called satyagraha (truth force)
• ‘If Christians had actually done what Jesus taught us to do – namely love our enemy – the world would long ago have been transformed’ (Gandhi-80)

• Hatred of the other can never lead to true liberation. There is brute-force and there is love-force. The use of active noncooperation or civil disobedience is a thousand times more effective than violence. (80)
• A major feature of the rebirthing of soul-force is action that is guided by creativity, rather than by the thoughtless counteraction of violence with violence. (81)

• Truth-force calls for both creativity and the courage to speak out. “It is as necessary to reject untruth as it is to accept truth.” (81)
• The NO that we must speak and live in our lives in the face of wrongdoing needs to be based on a deeper YES, a radical affirmation of the sacred core of every human being. (82)
• Our religious inheritances are given to bless the world, not to convert the world. “We have but one soul. The rays of the sun are many through refraction. But they have the same source.” (Gandhi 82)

Love Is the Strongest Yet Humblest Force

• As food is necessary for the body, prayer is necessary for the soul. (Gandhi, 82)
• There are angels of light and angels of darkness in us all. One moment we may be preaching nonviolence as the only true energy for real transformation in our world. The next moment we may be consumed by violence of heart. (84)
• Unless our ego is strong and secure enough to do the essential work of dying to the way in which it wants to be the center, we will obstruct the flow of soul-force, not promote it. (85)

• Gandhi’s assassination was driven by religious fundamentalism’s refusal to open the boundaries of the human heart. (85)

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

• Hidden in all things, even in the heart of the enemy, is the Sacred Presence challenging us to love. (86)

• Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God – MacLeod never abandoned his passion for peace. How? “I have remained single-minded on these matters over the years by being stone deaf.” (87)
• Peacemaking isn’t just a vision. It is a commitment to embodying that vision in the relationships of our lives and our world. (88)

CHAPTER 7

Reconnecting with the Unconscious

• The universe is so amazing in its interrelatedness that it must have been dreamt into being. (Thomas Berry, 89)
• New beginnings will be born among us when we open to the well of what we do not yet know or what we have forgotten deep within. (89)

Opening to the Well of the Imagination

• Brigid of Kildare is the saint who straddles the Christian and the pre-Christian. She embodied a devotion to Christ and an honoring of pre-Christian wisdom, especially its reverencing of nature and the healing properties of the earth. (90)
• The myths and legends of the Celtic world were incorporated into its celebration of Christ, like an old testament to the new revelation. (90)
• Twilight – the time ruled neither by the sun nor by the moon, but by the meeting of the two, where we encountering messengers from the invisible realms. In the Eastern traditions, this time is the early hours of morning..(91)
• Twilight/early morning is the time that is closer to dream life and the half-wakeful state of knowing in which both light and shadow come forth and all things appear as ONE. (91)

The Marriage of the Conscious and the Unconscious

• Modern prophet of the unconscious was Carl Jung, who believed wholeness was to be found by coming back into relationship with the unconscious depths of the soul. (91)
• We long for what is beneath the surface. The treasure lies in the depths of the water. (Jung 91)
• Unconscious is what we do not yet know or what we have forgotten – both personally and collectively.
• The collective unconscious is like a river of images which flow deep within the human soul – a common inheritance among all. (ME-somewhat like an animal’s instinct?)
• Wholeness consists of bringing together what has been torn apart. We live in a division of the parts – we have separated what God has joined together, the oneness of the universe. (Jung 92)
• The universe is an unfolding of God in paired opposites – everything has its complementarity. (Sun-Moon; Light-Dark; Male-Female; East-West; Hot-Cold; Black-White, Dry-Moist, etc)

• We need both ways of seeing...we have been strong at seeing the uniquenesses and accentuating individuality, but we have forgotten the oneness from which we have come. (93)
• To be born of the Spirit is to remember our oneness with each other, with the earth, and with those who seem most different – most threateningly different – from us. (94)
• By listening to our dreams of the night, or the daydreams and intuitions of our wakeful hours, we can access ways of seeing that will truly serve the holy work of bringing back into communion again what has been torn apart in our lives and our world. (95)

The Promise of Union

• George McDonald, Scottish novelist, drew heavily on world of imagination, to write fairy tales that dealt with themes of relationship.
• Story of The Day Boy and the Night Girl – opposites existing without awareness of each other. A story of how we live our ives in painful fragmentariness, in imprisonment that separates us from our authentic self. (97)
• Within all opposites is a hidden attraction which Jung calls the ‘promise of union’. True union delights in difference. It does not smother it.

• The unconscious invites us to discover the bliss of oneness. It does not diminish our uniqueness and individuality. Rather, it is a conjoining that delights in our differences and honors them. (98)
• What gets in the way of this movement toward wholeness is the ego. Again and again it strives to be the center, rather than serving the center.
• We need to die to the way in which our ego claims to be Lord so that we can truly live the dignity of our selfhood in the commonweal of relationship with all things. (99)

Dreaming the Way Forward

• How can the uniqueness of our Christian identity and story serve not simply our own preservation but the well-being of the world?
• God refuses to abide by traditions, no matter how sacred. (Jung 99)
• If the river of our Christian story is not flowing, it will cease to be. Just as in sleep every night we descend into the unconscious to be renewed, so our Christian story needs to reenter the world of dreaming and imagining to be born anew. (100)

• What if we had allowed our Christian story to freely live and unfold, rather than trying to nail down its meanings with doctrine? (100) The yet unknown might challenge us to change. (100)
• We need to allow our Christian story of the empty tomb to be reborn.
• As Peter said on the day of Pentecost, when Christianity was born, ‘Your young shall see visions and your old shall dream dreams’ (Acts2:17) New vision, new dreams, a new Pentecost, a rebirthing of Christ in us. Shall we be open to it? (101)

CHAPTER 8

Reconnecting with Love

God Is Love

• The best way to express the ineffability of love is to “name the unknown by the more unknown...that is, by the name of God.” (Jung, 105)
• A symbol is a throwing together of the known and the unknown, of what can be expressed with what is inexpressible. In the case of the cross, it is taking what we know, and throwing it together with what is beyond definition, love. In Christianity the cross becomes a symbol of God’s love, a symbol of the inexplicable. (106)

Background: St. Martin's Cross on Iona

• 
  With the mandala circle added to the cross, the opposite quadrants of the universe are joined. The only force that has the power to truly bring together the apparent opposites in our lives and our world is LOVE.
• The cross is a symbol of the mystery at the heart of Christianity’s great gift to the world – the belief that love can reconcile all things. (107)
• One of the distinct features of the Celtic cross is its conjoining of symbols. There is the cross – pointing to the way of Christ, to the love tha can bear all things – and there is the circle symbol – pointing to the oneness or inter-relateness of all things. (109)

Saying Yes to the Heart of the Other

• The deeper we move in the mystery of Creation, the closer we come to the Presence that Christ embodies. Deepest in us is the yearning for union, to remember the oneness from which we have come, and to live and move as one again. (110)
• When we say yes to the true heart of one another, we move back into relationship, or the kinship of all being (Dali Lama) or the new saintliness (Weil) (111)
  
• Everyone can, at some level, choose to violate the harmony. Everything has the capacity to resist oneness, to choose NOT to love. (112)

Giving Up Our Imaginary Position as the Center

• There is so much to love in the world that is way beyond the Church. (Weil) “The real presence of God is the beauty of the universe, not confined to one particular religious tradition or one particular practice or sacramental action. It is present everywhere and it is everywhere that we are. (113)

• Why do we not more often kneel, both literally and in our hearts? It is about emtying ourselves of our false divinity so that our true divinity may rise. (113)
• Weil says that in prayer we remember we are made of God and thus made of love. To be made of love, she says, is to remember that we are made of desire. We are made of holy longing. (114)

There Is No Distinction between Love and Justice

• The Gospel makes no distinction between the love of our neighbor and justice. To love others is to come close to them, to identify with them, and to do all in our power to shelter them and work for their well-being. (115)
• To truly love is to know how to say no to the false use of power, to denounce the abuse of force.
• To truily love is to work for a just equity of power between nations, races, genders, and in our day to day relationships and tranactions. (Weil, 115)
• The cross of Jesus shows us what we are capable of, that we can love even those who are most opposed to us.
• We do not need to believe IN Jesus as much as we need to believe WITH Jesus, to believe in the way of love. (116)
• True love and true justice require consent. We can never ignore the free choice of the other.

• To choose love is not something we do once. It is something we need to choose again and again and again. (118)
• We are made as a mean to love. It is God-given. The question is whether we will live what we truly are – love. (119)

EPILOGUE

• We must make the connection between the birthings that we are longing for and the way of dying or letting go that is implicit in every journey of new beginnings.

• The old dissolves to make way for what has never been before.
• Jesus said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. (John 12:24)
• How must we be born anew?
  • Fall in love with the earth again.
  • A revolution of the spirit
  • Learn to be astonished
  • Stop living from only ‘one half of the soul’
  • Be turned completely inside out
  • reconnect with soul force rather than brute force
  • die to ways in which we have been content to stop short at the muths of religious formulations of the past
  • Reconnect to love, the true sacrament of well being.