In Spirit and in Truth

The woman said to him, 'Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem'. Jesus said to her, 'Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.(...) But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. John 4:19-21, 23

In two simple words -- Spirit and Truth - Jesus reveals to the Samaritan woman and to all of us the essence of prayer. As God is a spiritual being, he is everywhere, prayer does not need done in a specific place; God transcends all places and at the same time is indwelling in all of them. Not restricted to a specific place, prayer is conditioned by our way of being and living. One can only pray, can only encounter God, when one lives and remains in the truth.

Yahweh, the God of the nomads
Greg Retallack did a research, where he established a relation between the identity of a deity worshipped in a particular temple and the location of this same temple. For example, the nomads living in areas with poor soils worshipped Hermes, the messenger of gods and the intercessor between mortals and the divine; peoples stationed in fertile terrains tend to worship gods of fertility like Hera.

Retallack concludes that the gods of ancient Greece did not arise from an imaginary poetic city, called Olympus, but they personify the lifestyles of those peoples; the bottom line, the ancients worshipped their own means of subsistence, or better said, they worshipped the One whom they believed would ensure these means.

God is a spiritual being - Compelled to guide their flocks in search of new pastures, peoples dedicated to pastoralism, like the Jewish people, are necessarily nomads. While the sedentary peoples build large temples and large statues to represent their beliefs; the nomads, in order not to carry heavy idols on their moves, conceptualized God as a Being who is at the same time transcendent and indwelling.

Transcendent because to be Creator of everything and everyone, he cannot be represented by anything that exists; for the nomads any material way of representing God is idolatry. Indwelling because he is in the heart of everything and each person, therefore easy to carry.

The Turkana, in northern Kenya, use the same word to mean both sky and God. In the same manner the Mongols, the Turks and the Tartars all worshipped Tengri, God of the blue sky. God, as in Heaven, is everywhere. A reality that is at the same time both transcendent and indwelling cannot be of material essence but rather of spiritual one.

God is a personal being -- Far from everything and everyone, shepherds spend a lot of time alone while keeping their flocks; the loneliness, fear and insecurity lead them to establish a relation with this spiritual Being; a Being who cares, protects and wants a personal relationship with each and every person. The deities of the sedentary peoples are materialistic and call the people to acquire more things. The deities of the nomads are spiritual and call the people to detach and disconnect from material goods to cultivate the spirit and to become much more.

Temples of the Holy Spirit (1Cor. 3:16)
Jesus answered him, "Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them... John. 14:23

God, a spiritual being, created us in his image and likeness; for this reason we are both a body, that is, we have a physical dimension and a spirit, we have a spiritual dimension. Our body is what we have in common with other creatures that God created; our spirit is what we have in common with the Creator.

As we are intrinsically temple of the Holy Spirit, we no longer have any more needs of temples to encounter God; we need only to keep silence and exercise contemplation entering within ourselves.

Silence is able to dig an interior space within us, to allow God to dwell  there, in order that his Word rests in us, so that the love for Him takes root in our minds and in our hearts, and animates our lives. (Benedict XI)

Prayer cannot occur without silence, nor silence without prayer, one leads to the other. The daily practice of meditation has benefits in general, as much physical as psychological and spiritual. It reduces stress, high tension, helps in concentration, sleep, overcomes anxiety, asthma, cancer. Meditation is for the soul what exercise is for the body. There are no contraindications only benefits at all levels.

What is the truth?
(...) For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the Truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." Pilate asked him, "What is truth?" John. 18:37-38

Since he does not wait for the answer, a rhetorical question, Pilate's statement is a bitter outburst of someone bored, who has not found the meaning nor comfort in the Greek and Roman philosophies and "modus vivendi" of the time. This same question was answered by Jesus to his disciples, when He showed himself to them as "the way, truth and life" (Jn. 14:6)

Jesus came to the world to testify to the truth, that is, to show men how to live the truth and in truth day-to-day. In this sense, since Christ is the truth, the gold standard of humanity, what it is to be authentically human, let us measure ourselves against Christ. Prayer, especially biblical prayer or "Lectio Divina", is in fact the act of measuring oneself against Christ.

To have Christ as the standard is to encounter truth in our lives; similar to connecting to a GPS that tells us where we are, what we are, where we should go, what we lack to get there and the path to take to arrive there.

So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Mattew. 5:23-24

When we measure ourselves against Christ we not only encounter our truth at the individual level, but also our truth as members of a community. To pray, therefore, not only has the vertical dimension to love God but also the horizontal one to love the neighbour. When I encounter God I am made to know my deficits to love the neighbour because God always asks as he did with Cain, where is your brother? (Gen. 4:9)

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, "God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector". Luke. 18:10-11

There are also those who live in prayer and in participation of liturgical acts to self-justify their falsehood. The weak knowledge of themselves leads to a weak knowledge of God and vice versa. Without self-criticism there is no progress in spiritual life, these people live the religion like opium substituting self-criticism with self-justification.

My truth
When you see a giant, first examine the position of the sun, to make sure that it is not the shadow of a dwarf. (Von Handerberg)

God reveals himself to those who are in contact with their reality. Those who have a false image of themselves will also have a false image of God; such person lives outside of self, having lost contact within he also loses contact with God. Paraphrasing the statement by Hardenberg there are many dwarfs, who do not accept their reality, projecting on themselves the image of the giant they pretend to be. Often hiding and projecting, on this idealized and false image of themselves, that they begin to identify with it and truly believe that they are that shadow.

There are no superiority complexes, the bully and the proud, that come across as being superior, in reality others see through them and feel their inferiority; by not accepting this inferiority, they look to hide behind it, not only from others, but even from themselves; therefore they fill up with themselves, like the frog who wanted to be bigger than an ox, to fill the emptiness that they feel. If we are called to be the Temple of the Holy Spirit, we cannot fill up with ourselves; that's why God does not live in those who are not humble since they are full of themselves.

When we lose touch of our reality, our truth, we then also lose contact with God because God cannot relate to someone who does not exist. God can only relate with me, when I am in contact with my reality; when I am honest with myself, not excusing my sins nor hiding from myself my defects; when I am authentic, not concealing behind false images of myself.

To have a false image of myself lead to having a false image of God. The result is that I am not me, and God is not God. In this situation, prayer is not possible since I walk divorced from my truth.

"Deus intimior timo meo"
It is said that God wanting to be found with some degree of difficulty, consulted with his angels on the best place to hide himself from men. One angel suggested that he be buried in the bottom of the Earth, but God felt that sooner or later man would end up digging and find him.  In the depth of the ocean, suggested another angel, it was also no good as men will one day have the capacity to explore the bottom of the oceans and will easily find him. I know, God said to himself, I will hide myself within the heart of man, he will search in all places except there…

St. Augustine used to say that God is beyond my intimate being. Like Jules Verne, in his Journey to the Centre of the Earth, in order to get to God I need to undertake a journey of introversion to the centre of my innermost being and beyond. This is the reason prayer is an exercise of self-awareness and self-knowledge. Like God, human being is also a mystery to himself; the one who prays increases at the same time knowledge of himself and of God.

Knowledge of God and of ourselves are parts of the same process. It is not possible to know oneself without knowing God, nor know God without knowing oneself; because God is beyond me, and to reach him I need first to pass me by.

Yoga, Reiki, Zen and transcendental meditation
Buddha was Indian and a Hindu therefore trained and versed in polytheism and in paraphernalia of unlimited number of deities. The result of all this gave rise to Buddhism, a "religion", or better said an atheistic spirituality. Traditional Buddhism is a way of enlightenment, to reach a perfection of self and even selfishness, because it does not take into account others nor our relation with them.

Today in the western world Buddhism comes to us mixed with other philosophies, in the form of New Age religious syncretism. To the New Age, God is not a personal being but rather an energy, with which we can all participate. Man is only a particle of this energy, living in space and time. If God does not exist as a person then human being is also not a person.

It is true that for us this is wrong; God is much more than an energy, he is a spiritual and personal being. A being who searched always to reveal himself to Man, and in a limited way throughout the history of humanity he did just that, ending up becoming incarnate in the creature he created for greater understanding and interaction.

To discern the best attitude to take towards the spiritual practices of the Far East, we look as an example the reaction of the Church to Darwin’s theory of evolution of species. Pope Pius XII accepted Darwin’s conclusions, in his encyclical Humanae Generis, just as Darwin himself did because he was devout and continued to believe in God the Creator and Saviour after his discoveries. It is irrelevant whether God created the human being directly or thought of it at the end of an evolutionary process.

In this sense we can also dissociate from Buddhism practices and other spiritual practices of the far east of their atheistic philosophies or ideologies. "What does not kill fattens" says our people in their simplicity, and Jesus says "Whoever is not against us is for us" (Mk. 9:40)

During these holidays, with free time, we should seek help in these eastern techniques and not give ears to those, Christian fundamentalists and fanatics, who like to throw out the baby with the bath water.

We can excuse ourselves for not having attended a Sunday Mass because there was no Church at the top of the mountain or in the depths of the valley, in the fluvial beach or in the maritime beach where we find ourselves; but we cannot excuse ourselves for not having encountered God in Spirit and our own self in truth.

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? I I ascend to heaven, you are there; (...) If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your right hand should hold me fast. If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night", even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you. Psalm 139:7-12

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC