I write, speak, invest, network, and question to stimulate fruitful conversation. Let's talk about human flourishing! It begins with freedom. Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom and generativity. Please join me in the adventure of realizing Christ!
Catholics Communicate Christ
Many years ago I published a quick handbook for Catholic writers, hoping to encourage more people to offer their writing in service to the Church. The title is being re-used for this new book, because I could not imagine a pithier synopsis of its content. We Christians exist in this world as the means God has chosen for His own self-revelation. To that end, we need to remedy the sad lack of community life within His Body. First, the Church, then the rise of the persons within her, and, finally, the rescue of those outside her – this is the order of approach. We need for the Church to be more fully realized as community, as collaboration, and as communication of Christ, in order that the Word may dwell more richly within us and resound in the world.
As always, my dream for this book is that it would stimulate many hours of wonderful conversation. Unless it is brought to life among the members of the Body, it will never be fully realized as a means of edifying the Church. I am always available to discuss any of my books, to speak on the topics I’ve invested in for many years, and to offer myself however I can for the good of this membership. Please let me know how I can be of help to you in any way.
I’d also dearly love your feedback on this book!
Thanks, in advance, Charlotte
P.S. See Catholics Communicate Christ at Amazon, here.
He Must Increase
I’ve just met Jason Nunez, of the John 3:30 podcast. Thanks to a listener who recommended me as a guest on his show, we had a lovely chat this morning. It’s now available here, and on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and anywhere podcasts can be found. Look for Episode #94 for my interview, and stay tuned for Jason’s big surprise in Episode #100, soon to come!
Here’s a bit more about Jason, from the John 3:30 site:
The John 3:30 Podcast is hosted by Jason Nunez. He is a Catholic Husband and Father who is doing everything he can to help get his Family to Heaven. Jason loves to watch movies with his family and he is a huge Dave Matthews Band Fan. He and his Family are Parishioners at The Church of The Holy Spirit in San Antonio TX. Jason was raised Catholic, but as most, he went through the motions for most of his Teenage, 20s and early 30s. After attending an ACTS Retreat in October of 2012 has been “on fire” for his Catholic Faith. Jason began to feel that God was calling him to spread the word on how “everyday” people keep their fire burning for our Catholic Faith. So The John 3:30 Podcast was created!! Join him as he shares the many ways our Faith can keep your fire burning. Thanks for listening and God Bless you all!!
“He must increase; I must decrease.” – John 3:30
Jason was interested in the resource I have available for free here: How to Plan a Great Catholic Event
We discussed the books Souls at Rest (endorsed by Dan Burke) Souls at Work (endorsed by Stratford Caldecott), Upschooling (endorsed by Joseph Pearce), and the Freedom Trilogy (You, Free , Full Spectrum Freedom, and 3D Freedom…endorsed by those I counsel personally). (These link to Amazon sales pages.)
He asked what one thought I wanted to leave with listeners, and that is: “If you need anything, please contact me. I actually respond!!!” Here’s a contact form for anyone reading or listening, who might have questions, need a phone chat or a correspondence or a speaker or help realizing their creative ideas, or who just wants to connect for conversation or some other adventure:
Joseph Pearce Likes My New Book!!!
“I can think of no better guide for homeschooling parents …”
Even if very few copies ever sell (think: zero marketing budget), the esteem of Joseph Pearce is satisfaction enough for me. Don’t get me wrong: I do wish copies would sell, too! But I am content to leave promotion in the hands of the Holy Spirit. My fondest hope is that groups of parent educators would get together and discuss a chapter now and then, and that I might be an encouragement to them in their profoundly important work.
Please help me welcome Upschooling into the world of print (cue applause):
Here’s a link to Upschooling on Amazon.
Here are all the goodies from the back cover:
If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. So says Chesterton. Homeschooling is so worth doing that it’s worth doing badly. It is, however, better to do it better. Charlotte Ostermann shows us how we can do it better. She shows us how to think so far outside the box that we can throw the box away. Even more important, she shows us beauty and how we can show beauty to our children. I can think of no better guide for homeschooling parents than Charlotte Ostermann.
Joseph Pearce, author of Frodo’s Journey, Catholic Literary Giants, and Literature: What Every Catholic Should Know
Charlotte Ostermann, veteran homeschool speaker, provides stimulating ‘teacher in-service training’ for parent educators. Each chapter is a meaty and inspirational seminar meant to challenge and encourage readers in their vocations. Parent, educator, evangelist, communicator, and anyone with an interest in the integral development of the human person will find this a rich resource for continuing education and intellectual growth.
If you missed the packed rooms where these talks were given in person, don’t miss this second chance to engage with the material. The author’s goal is to help you cultivate freedom for yourself and your students. Each workshop stands alone, so you may pick and choose to good effect. Pick one to read with a group if you love a great conversation!
“Charlotte Ostermann is a fine practitioner and excellent theorist of education. Those who read these chapters will find them winsome and wise; they are a source of potential delight and instruction for anyone interested in the nature and purpose of education or in practical strategies for educating one’s children or students well.”
–Benjamin V. Beier, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Education, Hillsdale College
“Charlotte has a way of communicating reality in a succinct yet rich way. Sometimes I remember her talk on flatitudes and floatitudes and it still helps me to have a lens through which I can analyze my choices and behavior on a day-to-day basis. She makes concepts that really are quite sophisticated accessible and exciting, as well as deeply personal and meaningful for my heart. Thank you Charlotte for being a missionary of Truth in today’s context! Anyone, not just home educators, can truly benefit from her work.” Brooklynn S.
“Charlotte’s talk left me with food for thought. It was well structured, thought through and presented.” Anna T.
“Her breadth of preparation and understanding, coupled with her unusually fine speaking skills, have made her a popular speaker for age groups from ages 18 to 80, from a variety of backgrounds.”
– Nancy Yacher, Department of English, University of Kansas
Praise for Souls at Work – An Invitation to Freedom
“Charlotte Ostermann’s Souls at Work is an engaging and beautifully written book that is particularly important for parents and home educators. I have been teaching my children at home for the better part of two decades, yet the ideas proposed about freedom and the life of the soul are new to me and have left me feeling refreshed and inspired.”
– Alice Gunther, author of Haystack Full of Needles
“If you are a teacher, or a homeschooler, or if you simply want to be ‘fully human, truly free,’ you will find what your soul needs in Charlotte’s gentle wisdom.”
– Stratford Caldecott, author of Beauty for Truth’s Sake
So Quote Me!
Flannery O’Connor says
“The ideal form for unadulterated wisdom is the aphorism.”1
A. G. Sertillanges, in Chapter 1 of The Intellectual Life, concurs:
“The world is in danger for lack of life-giving maxims.”
Well, here we go!
I love aphorisms, so may all my unadulterated wisdom be yours for the taking, or at least some of it I’ve managed to aphor-ize.
“Truth can comprehend error, but error can’t comprehend truth.”
“Don’t be a BB!”
“It’s not a great idea until it’s well-expressed.”
“Unless it moves through you, it doesn’t get to you.”
“Aim to get the child done through the work, not the work done through the child.”
“Your free act is an invitation to freedom for those who receive it.”
“Nothing is wasted in God’s economy.”
“You’re not going around in circles, but growing spirally, like a tree!”
“Christ makes you more truly and fully who you really are.”
“Today, you are more fully realized than ever before.”
“If it isn’t moving, it’s not mercy.”
“Sarcasm is the sound of one who despairs of being heard.”
“Frustration is the constant state of impatient souls.”
“Stop driving and dance!”
“To be free is to wield yourself according to your own desires, and to yield yourself according to God’s.”
“Think great thoughts!”
1Flannery, in a review of Walter F. Kerr’s book Criticism and Censorship, collected in The Presence of Grace (and other reviews by Flannery O’Connor), compiled by Leo Zuber, edited by Carter W. Martin, published by University of Georgia Press, 2008
Get Down, Get Pithy
How Pithy Can Your Apologetics Get?
When a child asks “Where do babies come from?” he may just be wondering if the new one can be exchanged, or he may need a simple reassurance that he came ‘from Mommy’ and not from toxic slime as his older brother insists. Experienced parents know what he probably does not want is a long, technical explanation accompanied by slides and illustrations.
Restraint is often the better part of apologetics as well. When an evangelical Christian, who really cares about these things, asks “Do ya’ll worship Mary?” the answer is “No.” If you go into the definition of worship, the historical veneration of Mary, and the different types of worship, he will hear one thing only: “Yep, they do–look at him try to weasel out of it!”
It may be frustrating to you that they don’t want to know the Whole Truth. Especially if you were an evangelical yourself and searched with great zeal for the big ‘T’. Give it up. Anyone with that goal in mind will keep asking questions. You’ll get your chance. Often these questions are trotted out as a ‘gotcha’ or a ‘dare’. They know we worship Mary and plan for you to be mighty uncomfortable being forced by their challenge to admit it.
You must discern when “Do Catholics offer Christ in sacrifice at every Mass?” really means “Do you think Christ’s one death wasn’t enough?” The answer is “No.” Keep to yourself all the rhetoric about un-bloody sacrifice and re-presentation of the one sufficient sacrifice. If you blurt it all out, they’ll hear one thing: “Yep, they think He has to die again every week–look at him try to weasel out of it!”
Here are some other pithy answers to ‘dare ya’ questions:
“Do you pray to dead people?” — “No.” (If you define the word pray, or explain the Church Triumphant, he’ll hear one thing: “Yep, they do–look at him try to weasel out of it!”)
“Is the pope perfect?” — “No.”
“Do Catholics think all of us other Christians won’t go to heaven?” — “No.”
“Did the Catholic Church add books to the Bible?” — “No.”
“Do Catholics worship that bread and wine?” — “No.”
“Do you guys have to earn your salvation?” — “No.”
“Do you worship saints?” — “No.”
“Is there any mediator besides Christ between God and man?” — “No.”
“Do you think saying a formula prayer over and over works better than just sharing your heart with Jesus?” — “No.”
“Do you have to believe all those wild apparitions?” — “No.”
You may need to convert their question into one you can answer concisely. Try to get to the core of their concern in your restatement of the question. Translate “Do you believe Mary is up there answering prayers and working miracles?” by saying “Does the power to work a miracle come from Mary? No!”
Convert “You think I need a priest to stand between me and God?” into “Does everyone have a direct, personal relationship with God? Yes!”
Change “Do you really believe I can say certain prayers or do some good works and then God is obligated to reward me?” to “Does anyone obligate God? No! He rewards good works and answers prayers however He sees fit.”
This refusal to bandy many words is not meant to be a withholding from others of the gift of your apologetics. It is based on careful assessment of your audience and your determination that you are dealing with someone who is daring you to admit what he already knows and considers proof positive against the Faith. He is not asking to hear answers, but an admission of guilt. Wordy answers will only prove things in the Catholic Church are as bad as he suspected. Your pithy ones may surprise him into digging deeper.
10 Facebook Favorites
Just so you’ll know, I don’t hate Facebook.
I just don’t have the energy to maintain a virtual presence there when my real presence still needs work.
Here are my 10 favorite Facebook usages:
- Asking the world to pray for unity in the Body of Christ on the 17th of each month, per Christ’s own prayer for this great good in John, Chapter 17.
- People on their way to adoration, asking for prayer requests and then really praying for each one before the Real Presence of Jesus Christ.
- Photos of amazing natural wonders and beautiful art images. Yes, add to the beauty my friends!
- Urgent prayer requests…finally a great reason to broadcast instead of to speak to folks individually. I may miss these requests, but I hold in my heart all the intentions of my friends and Facebook connections, so I’m not ignoring these!
- Catholic memes: good, clean fun. Thanks for sharing these!
- Songs that lift up your heart. They usually lift mine, too.
- Links to hopeful news items I might have missed.
- Reminders of what saint’s feast day this is, in case I didn’t know. I especially like the ones with a great quote.
- My blog posts magically link to my FB page and so I appreciate the boost that may give in readership.
- I love that FB will send me an email when someone mentions me, responds to a comment I’ve made, or has sent a message. I’ll miss something by dropping in only monthly, but not miss something meant for me, personally.
Evangelization Proposals
So, the Synod on the New Evangelization once came up with 58 Proposals for making the New Evangelization work. Some of them interest me more than others.
#4 Our participation in the life of the Trinity, our sonship, our identity as Christians is the source of our power to evangelize. Nothing new here, or anywhere in this, but a great reminder that to be better givers-away, we need to be more fully who we already are!
#11 Every opportunity for Scripture study should be made available, and the Scripture should permeate homilies, catechesis, and all our evangelization. Amen, amen! Our separated brethren in the Protestant churches will hear us more clearly if we speak ‘scripture,’ and put the lie to their sense that we don’t value the Bible.
#15, 16 Standing up for human rights, for the unborn, for religious freedom IS evangelization! We don’t have to take time away from all that to be contributing mightily to the New Evangelization. Perhaps we’ll add more scripture, more prayer, more loving-kindness to our methods, but rock on, ye who are fighting these fights!
#18 The most effective form of evangelization is the sharing of the testimony of life. How has your life in Christ moved you, changed you, helped you, challenged you, blessed you? TODAY??
#20 There should be a particular attention paid to the way of beauty. Beauty attracts us to love…In this light artists feel themselves privileged communicators of the New Evangelization. Can I hear a big whoop from writers and artists and poets and musicians out there??
#27 Education needs to promote everything that is true, good and beautiful. Is this happening at your school, boys and girls?
#34 Sunday needs to be recovered with its sacred and special character together with Sunday Mass, as the center of Catholic life. Souls at Rest, anyone??
#35 THE LITURGY OF THE CHURCH IS THE BEST SCHOOL OF THE FAITH. No more nun puppets, please Father!
#39 Pilgrimages to shrines and sanctuaries are an important aspect of the New Evangelization. Where shall we go? Who else wants to put up roadside shrines??
#45 The mission proper to lay faithful is the transformation of worldly structures. I love this! Let’s get busy!!! Life witness, works of charity and mercy, renewing the temporal order, and learning how to just flat proclaim what we believe….we can do this!!
# 52 The New Evangelization promotes ecumenical collaboration…in particular, the Church invites Christians to persevere and to intensify their relations with Muslims. Despite difficulties, this dialogue must continue. Sounds pretty clear to me….we can’t be part of the demonize-the-other-guy crowd, but must take the risk of identifying with him as a human being, and keeping a respectful dialogue going. Dialogue – it’s not just for ‘liberals’, but for anyone who wants to set people free: LIBERATORS!!
Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us!! I’d like to know what you think of all this, and what you’re consciously doing for the New Evangelization.
Practice of the Presence of Persons
I’m beginning to think we need more conscious practice for being present to persons.
Though I know that you are a deep mystery and a unique, unrepeatable reality, you enter my space as an object in the environment and I often do not register your presence at all. This is a sad state of affairs, exacerbated by the speedy pace of life, the isolation of persons in cars and suburbs, the barely-there transactional symbology that counts as ‘communication,’ and other obvious factors of reality that I can’t change.
What can I change? What can I suggest to help along this ‘practice of the presence of persons’?
- Prayer before coming into the presence of others. “Dear God, please help me to be fully present to those I am about to encounter, to believe you have arranged for me to meet with the particular individuals who are present, to resist my own inward resistance to showing real heart hospitality to them, and to place my interest truly into the essence of who each person is and yearns to be. And Lord, please help me remember their names!” (I am so bad at this!) “Please bless our time together, help us to edify and encourage one another, and remain undistracted by other concerns during our visit. Please come into the space between us to unify us for your greater glory.”
- Courtesy. I think we should resurrect the courtesy of formal greeting and leave-taking. I’m trying to move into a “Grace and peace to you” format that I usually forget as greetings take a much more casual turn and the moment is lost. I love getting and giving good-bye hugs, but still stand there wondering if I’ll seem foolish, old-lady-ish, or overly personal if I lunge forward with a hug someone doesn’t want. Still, if you come to my Open House, please say hello on arriving and good-bye on leaving, please. And I’ll do the same when we all meet for book groups or meetings or whatever.
- Be affected. I need to do more than see you. To be present to you is to receive you into my own being and to be affected by you, there. I can’t be present to you without that opening that allows you entrance and makes me somewhat vulnerable to you. I hope I can look into your eyes and that you’ll see yourself loved in mine. I need to do more than hear you. You need to sound in me so that I resonate with you, mirror your movements and expressions, sense the meaning beneath the message on the surface. Just the other day, as I was listening to a friend and being deeply affected by him, one word he said in passing seemed to reverberate in me. I couldn’t shake the sense that this word held much more meaning for him and, as it turns out, it sure did! When I asked why that word was somehow very important or meaningful to him, out came the stories and the emotions elicited by them. It was fascinating to experience the reality that one word could ‘carry’ so much ‘weight’. He hadn’t realized it himself, but as we explored it together it was clear that God had helped my own heart be troubled with a message meant for his healing. What a delicate, lovely instrument the open, affect-able heart is!
Naturally, I am very much interested in your thoughts about how we can better practice the presence of persons. Please let me hear from you!
Know any Podcasters who Need Guests?
Born to Run
I’m not a fan of extreme sports. All that youthful energy and money spent on dangerous thrill-seeking seems wasteful and presumptuous to me. How much more surprising, then, that I thoroughly enjoyed Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run – stayed up into the wee hours, in fact, turning the pages with rapt interest!
What captured my attention in the stories of a tribe of Running People was not the athletic prowess of these seemingly superhuman ultra-distance runners, but their evident ease and delight in the simple act of inhabiting their own bodies as those bodies hurtled through space over dangerous terrain for hundreds of miles.
Joy, as I have said, is the fruit of freedom. I feel in their exhilaration a perfect resonance with the three-dimensional, not-of-this-world, utterly abandoned, glorious freedom of the children of God. The freedom made possible by the indwelling of Christ is as far beyond mere human freedom, rich as it can be, as the running of the Tarahumara is from the injury-prone, time-focused, effortful exertions of typical distance runners.
How I would love to attract readers to running a race that is an order of magnitude greater than any marathon they have yet tried! May you find freedom infused with Rest, in contact with both earthly reality and limitation and with time outside time, where your soul takes flight.
Quantum Confusion
In my Freedom Trilogy (You, Free, Full Spectrum Freedom, and 3D Freedom), I speak of the human person as ‘three dimensional,’ rather than as the flattened, linear being he has been reduced to by post-Enlightenment scientific materialist reductionism. I’m not the only one talking about the reduction of man. Joe Dispenza has been called to my attention because he, likewise, speaks of our being ‘dimensional,’ and ‘non-linear’. I was familiar with Dispenza, having read his book The Placebo Effect and found it fascinating. I’ve now spent hours listening to him to see where we might resonate with one another. When he sticks to new scientific discoveries, it’s a thrilling ride. I fall away as he makes a new religion of it all.
I want to be on record as cautioning Catholics against uncritical acceptance of his (and similar) work. He and I, it would seem, both are interested in inviting people to find greater health, coherence, free agency, and happiness. The appeal of his work is, in part, the truly fascinating documentation of the scientific basis for the claim that our thoughts have tremendous potential to change our physical, emotional and relational experiences.
My problem with his approach, though, is that it offers escape from, rather than correspondence to reality; manipulation for power and gain, rather than glorification of God; and self-making rather than co-operation with God’s work in the human person for His own, greater, purposes. While I find much to disagree with, there are a few points of cautious agreement. I would definitely not recommend his work to those without mature, Catholic discernment. By ‘Catholic’ I mean, ‘actually Catholic,’ and not just ‘Christian,’ because it is clear to me that any fragment of the full deposit of faith will not be a sufficient ground for (and might be a dangerously shaky ground for) engagement with ideas like his that so closely approach received truths before bending them. In fact, much of the force driving uncritical acceptance of ideas like these is coming from a fractured Christianity looking to the quantum field for coherence instead of to the Church.
I, like many writers today, speak of ‘freedom,’ ‘energy,’ ‘hopeful futures,’ ‘resonance,’ ‘transcendence of past emotions,’ ‘cognitive restructuring of habit patterns,’ ‘neuroplasticity,’ and ‘wholeness.’ Unlike most, I do not believe that the ‘possible human’ is possible without God, or that there is any place in thought or on earth to stand as secure as His Church, for the full realization of human beings.
My ‘3D Free’ human person is coherent as one single personality over time, within the being of God, and may not look ‘highly evolved’ or ‘successful’ or even ‘healthy’ here on earth. His soul develops along with his virtue, his correspondence to reality (not his projection of self onto reality), and his love of God. Love (a Person outside him, not a feeling inside him) is the context of his being, and Love reaches toward him whether he reaches toward higher consciousness or not. His destiny is to be raised above the angels into eternal communion with the Person who made him. He will never be God, thank God, but will have opportunities while in time to grow better able to enjoy the adventure of life in co-operation with God. The only point of entrance into the divine mind is His own Word, Jesus Christ, who spoke definitively from the Cross the words continuously resounding through His Body to this day: Thy will be done.
I actually think that some of what quantum physics is probing is the ‘matrix of Holy Wisdom,’ pre-material structure of correspondences between the persons of the Trinity – a ‘web’ of law pulsing with the light generated by the Love flowing ceaselessly between them. If man is made for correspondence to reality, then it would seem he would eventually arrive at, at least, the outer boundary of this interior life of theirs to find his own earthly reality limited by comparison. It may be that in growing toward our destiny we will, collectively, come into possession of laws that supersede without negating all we know as natural law.
The havoc we’ve wreaked as we’ve learned to manipulate the laws of the material creation should teach us not to grasp too quickly for more. I believe that the protection of the Church, of Sacraments, of Christ’s interior presence and of clear doctrine is a necessary support even for approach to what may be a ‘dimension’ of seemingly incomparable ‘power and glory.’ The phrase, “To God be all glory and power” has never been so clearly needed as now, when man is on the verge of hacking his own brain. Those who enter this new territory unprotected and naively believing they are alone there, without non-material enemies who may more readily take advantage of them the more they dissociate from concrete reality may find it very difficult to maintain self-coherence and sanity as they pursue ‘possible futures’ that glitter with wish fulfillment.
Sadly, there are those I would love to reach who will discount my books out of hand because I approach this territory of self-realization, realization of hopeful futures, full human dimensionality. I use, for instance, the words ‘quantum shift’ to discuss the amazing power of the moment when a man becomes an actor, able to respond to reality, instead of an object being crushed by reality. Some won’t make it past the word ‘quantum,’ and such is life.
What follows are more specifics about the things that repelled and those that attracted me in Dispenza’s work. I believe that his intentions are good, and that he is dangerous not because of all his errors, but because of so much that is right in the mix, thus causing confusion. These are my own listening/reading notes and thoughts, and have not been formalized into full arguments. Take them as suggestions about what to consider, rather than as systematic documentation or proof. Please avoid his teachings unless you clearly understand the ‘red flag warnings’ below.
RED FLAGS
Gnosticism
JD offers the possibility of gaining access to higher consciousness, enlightenment, divine mind via special teaching, initiation, spirit guidance; notice that the speaker, once famous, offers himself to an increasingly narrow in-group of higher-paying true believers; if you currently have a ‘lesser evolved spouse,’ for instance, you might need a change to fit your new higher consciousness Note: Catholic teaching is available and accessible to all and is life-changing, life-supporting and life-giving to a degree never matched in history.
The Guru overrides the wariness of his listeners
JD subtly groups those who are ‘in’ and ‘out’, constantly asks “Are you with me?” cautions listeners against their feelings of wariness, a non-believer in the group might ruin the vibe for everyone in the collective mind…chilling cutting out of those with ‘lower consciousness’ Understandably, when the message is ‘believe rightly’ and you will get what you want, it’s important that our desires don’t clash (I can’t give you this power if you’re liable to use it to get something I don’t want you to have.), thus our beliefs can’t clash or we won’t evolve. Note: Jesus welcomes all, isn’t threatened by those who don’t believe. It’s interesting that the best support in the world for a society with respect for a plurality of beliefs is…drumroll please…Christianity. It wasn’t even a possibility in the pre-Christian world.
Escape Limitations
anything will be possible to those who believe and cultivate the power to create reality, the escape of the limitations of personality, past, concrete reality is a constant theme here; Note: true freedom is possible because of limitations. In the ‘reality’ the Church is talking about, the concrete/natural is woven together beautifully with the ideal/divine in such a way that we do not escape from, but rather reconcile our persons to, God.
Escape Dogmas, Doctrines
JD wants to achieve a direct connection to the divine; he is decidedly anti-religion and I have an article of his in which he advocates getting rid of the ‘big three’ by any means necessary…clearly we are interfering with man’s evolution; Note – God (a person, not an impersonal ‘divine mind’) has made Himself known through the incarnation of His Son, who is now present to the world (Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity) through the mediation of His Body, the Church.
Evolution of Super-Man as Dogma
JD et al understandably seek divinization, but without a god to bow to. Man will become his own god, create himself, sustain his own being by use of knowledge, power, technique. Note: growing up in all things unto Christ is the hope of the Christian and the path toward his divinization – it requires the person’s co-operation with the action of God upon the person; co-operation involves seeking knowledge of God as He is, in His Church, in His Eucharistic Presence, whereas this self-evolution sounds more like grasping at the possibility of the risen self without going through the identification with the crucifixion of Christ; I am not evolving to become a superman, but growing up to become, at my ‘highest’, a unique and unrepeatable realization of Christ, through whom I will continue to live as an individual not because of my highly evolved being, but because of His atoning sacrifice. So this desire for divinization is awareness of a possibility God himself designed…but to approach it outside his own ‘way’ of approach is dangerous.
Surrender
the experience of the ‘highest consciousness’ is one of utter abandonment to the experience of being, but this is a human person ‘angelicized,’ transcending the actuality of matter; Note: we are meant for surrender only to the Lord God Jesus Christ. Our souls long for this union with Him and then are prey to offers of surrender-experience that get around the actual surrender to Him. Such substitutes can be overwhelmingly positive as physical or emotional experiences (like concerts, drug use, illicit sex, etc…) and thus prevent our reaching out for the only thing that truly satisfies the soul’s longing for him. Self-generated gamma-wave states are not necessarily bad, and may do the body or mind some good, but the danger is that people are accepting them as the ultimate experience. The ‘enlightened ones’ are less and less able to turn and bend down to the reality of the life they lead on the ground, with actual people, serving unenlightened ones, or experiencing tremendous distress or difficulty.
Leaving the Self Behind
the utopia of ‘higher consciousness,’ even when it seeks physical health, seems aimed at the unmaking of individual selves; the teachings hit at the very notion of a single coherent self and lure listeners toward the ‘possibility thinking’ of continuous self-reinvention and merger into the collective mind; Note: the self is meant to be coherent over time, into eternity; so many voices are suggesting to people that they can be any number of selves/personalities and can write any story…I am not meant for ultimate mergence into some universal mind, or being, or force, but to become fully myself, inhabiting the destiny God has held for me in His own being since the moment in time when I was conceived and He gave me being.
Creating the Future
sounds like the ‘name it and claim it’ gospel…yes, we affect the future by our ideas and actions now, and yes, through prayer the Holy Spirit can “untie knots” caused by past events, but this sounds more like an attempt to control the future, or to have power over the future…I prefer to be truly peaceful by finding perfect trust in God to bring the self into encounter with whatever reality will help open my path into the future that leads to my destiny IN GOD…If you combine JD’s ‘great future’ with his ideas that religions should be squashed at all cost and that the less-evolved deserve whatever they get and you have a recipe for some very non-loving acting-out of people who’ve been taught they should get whatever they want in life.
Contempt for Means
I think protestant and secular culture have in common a ‘contempt for means’ that makes the Catholic, Sacramental way of being seem muddied with intermediaries and material stuff that interfere with ‘direct experience’ of God. So, the world is crying out for ‘experience’ and every marketer is feeding it to them through star intermediaries and material, imagistic, sensorial contexts crafted to be so immersive only the ‘direct experience’ remains embedded in the brain as pleasure-connected-to-product without the interference of the verbal, judgemental mind. People are sitting ducks for im-mediacy.
Mere Spirituality
lots of love and spirit and ecstasy and mysticism in these teachings; no allusion at all to any kind of angelic beings also operant in the ‘quantum field,’ so either the angels are not playing this game, or the demons are hiding until the boundaries of self are utterly broken down..Materialist vs Trans-materialist/spiritual are opposite extremes that could lead to worship of mammon, worship of …the quantum field? The possible self? An angelic guide? A guru? Note: no dogma, no doctrine = no ground, no foundation. All of this can be easily spiritualized to fit with any religion except ‘the big three,’ which may be why they seem so hostile and need to be gotten out of the way.
Imagination
the process JD teaches is the cultivation of an image of a desired-for Something, so vividly that the emotions of having received/achieved it are generated in response to the image. This is an amplification of the common, garden variety process by which people realize imagined ideas every day. One’s idea must touch the desire/emotions in order that the will be engaged to move toward the good. This is not a bad thing in itself, but how many people have the maturity necessary to both focus so intensely on an imagined good and also relinquish attachment to it? That detachment is a further necessity that brings even a great idea into tension with the will of God and the resolution of that tension is what actually ‘grows’ the person.
I worry about the greater context made possible by the extension of self imaginatively into the ‘quantum field,’ the future, or the field of all possibilities. Unless it becomes a vessel for the light of God, or an structure that leads upward to Truth, a context can become a trap (such as music, imagination, systematic theology) that serves for temporary expansion, but ultimately limits your horizons. In my Freedom Trilogy, I try to show, graphically, how the imagination can extend us forward, but also be a dangerous limitation in our encounter with reality.
I worry that your strongly imagined, filled-with-the-requisite-emotional-assent, intention may become a demand. If you demand to have what you imagine, you are not free. Your interior disposition prevents your acting in freedom to realize that idea, or move toward that desired good. I would never counsel you to fixate on developing a better mental image of what you want, because of this danger. You can become a slave to a strongly held idea.
Attraction
People are understandably fascinated by the scientific proofs that science doesn’t explain everything. A window has been opened in the bunker of materialism and a fresh breeze is blowing in. The romantic reaction to the scientific reductionism of the modern world has a new voice in quantum physics. Christians need to speak this language, but offer the necessary correctives I perceive in the one word, Church. With Jesus in John, Chapter 17, I pray that his people will be one – united under His headship to serve the world with clarity and confidence born of the Spirit’s protection of our doctrines and our unity.
Thanks for your attention to this. Please let me know what you think. I am very much open to cordial discussion of all these thoughts, and of those in any of my books.
Poets Can Be Troublemakers
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