(Article Published in Corpus Reports, Sept.-Oct., 1997)

Eugene C. Bianchi, Emory University

Carl Jung once said something to the effect that a major defect of Christianity was its failure to develop its myth to speak vibrantly to the contemporary mind. Jung then went on to rethink aspects of the Christian myth(s) in psychological directions around the transformation of the human psyche. Although I will not try anything that ambitious today, I would like to share with you some thoughts about how we may re-vision our tradition in ways that might speak to a new age, sometimes referred to as post-modern and post-Christian. What I want to address, trans-traditional spirituality and its consequences for the priest/minister of tomorrow, is another way of talking about a wider ecumenism based on our common humanity rather than on this or that particular religious heritage. The ecumenical thrust of Vatican II was one of the council's most important achievements, but as Karl Rahner said of this council, it was a beginning not an end. So many signs of our times call for the extension of the ecumenical spirit in ways that may not yet be familiar to us. We are on the cusp of a new age of promise and peril: the ever-more crowded global village with limited resources, the extraordinary potential of cybernation and technology, the globalization of wealth and extreme poverty -- these and other signs summon us to imagine and invent a wider spirituality. To this end, I will center my remarks on two themes: (1) breaking through to trans-traditional spirituality, and (2) within this perspective, the role of priest/minister as spiritual seeker, guide and healer.

Before we launch out into these choppy currents, a few personal remarks seem in order. I am not saying that this vision of things religious is for everybody. Nor am I looking down on people who find satisfaction and salvation in older forms of religion. Let people be where they are; I am not trying to "compel them to enter," in the words of our old friend, Augustine. But I doubt that you brought me from Atlanta to Boston, this hub of the universe as it used to say in the sidewalk outside Filine's basement, to "make nice" and repeat the familiar. Moreover, I speak to you as an aging man who for the last seventeen years has written and spoken on creative elderhood. Now I'd like to live out a quality of greater freedom that I found in inspiring older men and women. I would like to emulate these people who, in the words of elder writer, Tillie Olsen, have overcome their silences, conditioned by fears of being unorthodox, unaccepted and inadequate.

To establish a basis for trans-traditional spirituality, we need to let our minds go back well beyond the rise of Christianity and other major traditions to the origins of religion. Even a brief tour through these nebulous regions of pre-history makes it clear that our most basic religious identity isn't Christian or Muslim or Hindu, but rather human. In those early days of the human project, we banded together in small groups for protection and survival. Through many epochs we had evolved from our mammalian forebears into various bands of unusually gifted hand and brain creatures, as Teilhard de Chardin called us. Our most profound object of worship was not Allah or Jahweh or Brahman; rather it was that life-force common to all of us, symbolized by the sun and by the life-producing earth. The transcendent was already immanent and "incarnate" in the natural order whence we sprang. Our earliest spirituality was fundamentally ecological, this-worldly and to quite an extent universal among our kind.

In more recent eras of human development, our lively imaginations began to invent special rituals around death and other key life events and passages. We see this in ancient burial rites and on the murals in the caves of Lasceau. Soon early theologies and cosmologies began to form as we endeavored to make sense of life and death in our tribes and in the natural world. Our myths and rituals, while increasingly particular, were still fluid and founded in large part on the universality of nature. Some nineteenth century scholars labeled these religions "animistic" and primitive, in the pejorative sense; they saw them as stages to be overcome by more sophisticated religion (usually some type of Christianity) in the evolutionary process. But for our purposes, hold on to the fundamental image of earliest spiritualities, those quests for meaning and fuller experience of the mystery of existence, spiritual quests that focused on nature as a universal phenomenon. For this common base of all incipient religion provides the foundation for our most basic spiritual self-identity as human beings. This primordial identity will allow us to move beyond (not to reject) the particularities of the religious traditions into which we were born or which we chose in the course of life.

When we fast-forward into recorded history, especially in the West, we notice two important happenings. First, religions become more and more focused on sky gods who take on the personality of parents. The divine recedes from earth and takes on personality in the sky, away from our earlier nature spirituality. Look at Christian iconography and liturgy; the direction is up and away as in the Ascension or descending from above as in the Incarnation. We don't imagine Jesus Christ coming from the earth, much less from a uterus. Even today when the devotees of the Virgin Mary come to Conyers, Georgia, they search the skies for an apparition. Nothing wrong with the upward symbolism in itself, but it runs the risk of wanting to get away from here, from this place of insecurity and death. How much of our Christian imagination is quite similar to that of the Heaven's Gate group minus the quick blast-off of suicide? And it is also very normal that humans would eventually envision the deity as the perfect parent who would make things right and secure for his loyal children. Parental imagery is filled with emotions of affection and care, unless children have been otherwise alienated from their life-givers. Our scriptures are filled with such parental images. Yet even here dangers lurk. It becomes easier to be pulled away from our universal spiritual nature as earthlings and find ourselves in very select families of the elect, the saved, those whom the sky parent has chosen as his special children. I think of this sometimes when I hear post-Vatican II Catholics forever repeating "People of God." The pages of history are still bleeding from battles between the families of God. Moreover, the image of God as benevolent sky parent, while supplying parental solace, may be our attempt to limit and tame the incomprehensible mystery. The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao, we are reminded early in the Tao Te Ching. The Jews have been ever wary of naming God.

The second thing we notice with the appearance of the sky god is the increasing institutionalization of religion in terms of sacred offices, orthodox beliefs and practices (with sanctions for errant ways). My point is not that this evolution, as seen in Christianity, is wrong or even unusual. Actually, it is very human to institutionalize and ritualize. In face of the great insecurities of life and death, it is all too human to look to established religion to have the right answers, to direct people to salvation, to control the means of being saved, to sacralize offices like pope, bishop and priest, endowing them with suprahuman efficacy and meaning. While this is very normal activity for our insecure kind, it also tends to draw us away from what we had in common with fellow humans simply as creatures of earth. Now that we have personalized the mystery of the great life-force into a father figure, he easily becomes the biggest boss of all, the owner of the salvation industry who doesn't take kindly to competitors. These religious imaginings about God are quickly reflected in his ecclesial vicars who claim universality for very particular brands of religion and who tend to impose their views on the unknowing or on dissenters.

Again, this is not an argument against institutional religion. Humans institutionalize in virtually all realms; in the process, they create rules, customs, rituals, sacred documents and ethical systems. And they will continue to act in this way. Moreover, most of us were introduced to the spiritual life through the institutions of family and church. Our earliest religious sensibilities, later judged valuable or harmful, were shaped in the teaching, preaching, rituals and scriptures of organized religion. But however significant these beginnings were for us, they do not plumb our most basic spiritual identity which is that of human beings, immersed in evolutionary nature, beings already spiritual in our quest for meaning and experience in the life of our planet. Institutional religion has contributed significantly to obscuring our primordial spiritual identity in the ordinary realm of daily life by confining or limiting the religious to myths and rituals that the institution considered sacred: doctrine, sacraments and personages held to be holy and authoritative because of their offices. I belabor this point about our natural spiritual potential as humans to break the mold of secular-sacred separation, or at least to pry it open a bit.

This point is also made in another idiom by John O'Donohue who talks about the priesthood of the human heart. (The Way, Summer, 1995, p. 43 ff.) Each person, says O'Donohue, is already a sacrament in his or her humanity. Each person has spiritual and mystical potential. I would add that nature, too, is such a sacrament, a sign of the presence of God. If we understand this as a radical starting point, we can prepare the ground for a powerful re-visioning of our traditional religious identities as not primarily Christian or Muslim or Jewish. We will be ready to move to a trans-traditional spirituality rooted in our human identity. Our particular traditions will become points from which to launch a spiritual journey across old borders. Our specific traditions will in some sense become relativized and porous or permeable to the spiritual signs of the times. If we embrace this common human spirituality and mystical potential, we will also think in significantly new ways about the nature and function of spiritual leadership. How can we recognize authentic spiritual leadership? Do such qualities have anything to do with ordination, with marital situation, with sexual preference, with gender, with being pope or bishop, with lay or clerical status? What will be the roles of spiritual leaders in the new age? Will these tasks be primarily the mission of preaching the word and dispensing the sacraments as we have understood these activities in the past? Or will the tasks be something quite different? Will the new spiritual leader bring the gospel to the sinful masses or will he or she help to awaken the domain of God already within nature and in nature's human offspring?

But before we turn to spiritual leadership, let me discuss further the theme of trans-traditional spirituality. Can we come up with a working definition, realizing that all definitions in this realm are inadequate? First, let's say what it is not. Trans-traditional spirituality is not an attempt to formulate an Esperanto religion where everyone speaks and acts alike. Diversity and particularity are rich components of the world's wisdom traditions; these qualities should be preserved. Trans-traditional spirituality is not an endeavor to form still a new institution, some kind of United Nations of religion. Rather, trans-traditional spirituality is an attitude or disposition of openness to spiritual wisdom wherever it presents itself. Such insight can come through seemingly secular areas of art, music, biography, science and many other places in human experience where the soul is moved and enriched. It is an attitude of very broad ecumenism in which the religious seeker, either individually or with others, invites and experiences insights and practices from her own and other wisdom movements. To position oneself in this frame of mind, it is helpful to keep in the foreground our primal spirituality of being human, and to hold one's own specific religious tradition (however broadly or narrowly defined) as very valuable but as a partial and culturally relative approach towards truth. Trans-traditional spirituality also implies that we are able to say yes and no to aspects of our own tradition, a process of retrieval and abandonment.

Developing a metaphorical and historically conditioned understanding of theological doctrines and church practices becomes a crucial dimension of trans-traditional spirituality. Here we can learn from A. N. Whitehead for whom all religion was "in the making," that is, all religions are products of the human imagination in history; they are all testimonies to the human imagination, individually and in groups, struggling for transcendent meaning and experience. Metaphorical theology recognizes the "as if" in all our statements about divinity and religion; it also acknowledges the limits of the mind to penetrate these realms of mystery. The opposite of such metaphorical theologizing are the various forms of fundamentalism, characterized by literalism, a static understanding of the evolution of human consciousness in history. Such religion also exudes a heavy dose of authoritarianism. Fundamentalism in different modes is probably as present in Catholicism as it is in Protestantism. I am not attacking the worth of fundamentalist people or the genuineness of their religiosity; I merely observe that many have not enjoyed educational circumstances that might help them move beyond what Paul Ricoeur called "the first naivete." But church leaders with some level of theological sophistication should know better. When they propound fundamentalist views, they are frequently trading in tactics of false security and crowd control. By embracing a metaphorical religiousness, trans-traditional spirituality follows the teaching of eastern and western contemplatives. The title of a very influential book of medieval Christianity, The Cloud of Unknowing, reminds us of this long tradition. And the master in the Tao Te Ching teaches people "not-knowing"; only when she has emptied their minds of rigid concepts can they dip into the wells of the Tao within themselves. Religious insecurity may be the first step toward spiritual wisdom.

When we move in the direction of trans-traditional spirituality, many difficult questions arise, questions that we can at least ask without hoping to adequately address in this presentation. How do we discern authentic from inadequate and even harmful teachings and practices? How do we find sound teachers and distinguish them from charlatans and exploiters? How do we avoid the "lite" fare of a superficial smorgasbord for easy enlightenment? How do we keep from falling into subjective, feel-good religion in a world that calls for ethical awareness and responsibility? These are difficult questions that we need to keep asking ourselves as we shape our own spirituality; but they do have satisfactory answers from Christian and nonChristian spiritual sources. A last word on these caveats. Although these real dangers exist, the tendency of established religion is not to trust the free movement of the Spirit within the spirits of people. A trans-traditional spirituality means trusting people to make mistakes, to learn by trial and error, to discover their own spiritual paths.

Perhaps I can make trans-traditional spirituality a tad clearer if I briefly speak of it from my own experience. This picture is not is not intended as template for everyone, just an ever-changing vignette of one man's journey. I see myself as a cosmopolitan and cultural Catholic who is grateful for a long religious education from the Jesuits to the Taoists. I discover spiritual meaning and inspiration from my own tradition: its saints, scholars, scriptures, contemplatives and social justice activists...sometimes even from its liturgies. I have no problem about worshiping and taking communion with Protestants. But whether I'm sitting with my Atlanta small faith community or in an Episcopal church or in a Tibetan Buddhist instruction and practice session, my metaphorical mind stays active, as does my demythologizing and deconstructive apparatus. There are some creeds that I simply can't say and mean, so I don't. In these ways, I am religiously eclectic and admittedly at sea where I will most likely stay until I die; maybe that is why I am so drawn to iconography of very small vessels journeying at sea, and why I would like some of my ashes scattered in a river running to the sea. I think institutional reform in the church is important, not because I think all spirituality resides there, but because institutions can impact significantly on the wellbeing or to the detriment of people and the earth. For over two years, I have been engaged in a study of Jesuits and former Jesuits in the U.S., as a prism for understanding major structural and ideological changes afoot in the Catholic Church. Buddhism has brought me back to the contemplative western tradition which I got into as a very young man before I had enough life experience to really appreciate it. The books on the floor near my meditation cushions are the New Testament, an old Catholic missal, the Tao Te Ching, modern Taoist meditations and, currently, Jon Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go, There You Are. The latter keeps me in touch with the Buddha statue on a low rattan table with lit candle, joined by a Russian icon of Mary, who doesn't seem to mind the company; looking down on all this is a portrait of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I must admit that the Taoist and Buddhist themes speak more cogently to me in late life than much of the New Testament. I wonder if it would have been otherwise if Jesus had lived to be eighty-five? My standard poodle, Rhainy, is a constant meditation companion, and she represents a major shift in my spirituality towards what we call the natural world.

Ecological spirituality has been leading me in the opposite direction from that of Heaven's Gate, towards the planet not away from it. Despite its doctrines of creation, incarnation and sacramentality, Christianity on the whole is still a sky religion promising to take us to another and better place. Theologians like Sallie McFague (The Body of God) and others are working on the periphery of the churches to re-vision Christian teaching in an ecological mode. Our liturgies have scarcely begun to move from conversations between humans and the divine to include in a significant and intrinsic way the animal and natural world. Perhaps most important from a spiritual point of view is the almost total lack in Christianity of cultivating its contemplative tradition for all the faithful. This has great repercussions for ecological spirituality because the latter calls for more than adherence to concepts about saving the earth. Such spirituality depends on our ability to bond with the earth at an affective and contemplative level. E. O. Wilson's concept of "biophilia", love of the biosphere, implies a kind of "metanoia" that turns us around to respect and love the earth. Such a contemplative ecological spirituality can become the basis for developing ecological ethics. My movement toward a more vegetarian life style in a small way manifests an awareness of the ecological consequences of meat eating in a world of overpopulation, pollution and misuse of land as well as unnecessary destruction of animals. (see "The Ecological Challenge to Christianity," Eugene C. Bianchi, to appear in New Theology Review to be published in 1998)

In the final part of these reflections, let's ask ourselves how this sketch of trans-traditional spirituality might work out in the lives of priest/ministers of the coming age. I would like to discuss some of above themes in terms of the priest/minister as seeker, guide and healer. Moreover, I will try to reflect on all this from the standpoint of Jesus, the itinerant Judean sage, whom Christians see as the central figure of their religion. I am basing this view of Jesus on the extensive work of a group of respected New Testament scholars as reflected in Robert Funk's Honest to Jesus (HarperCollins, 1996). These scholars think that the religion of Jesus must be distinguished from the religion about Jesus. The former is found by close study of the parables and aphorisms; the latter was already being developed in the theological beliefs of New Testament writers and it expanded through the centuries to Calcedon and beyond. In brief, this process turned Jesus the iconoclast into Jesus the icon; Jesus the sage into Jesus as God. Of course, this is a huge topic whose ramifications go far beyond the scope of my remarks. But I want to center on just a few preliminary points for my own application of this perspective. Although I think Funk and the Jesus Seminar are closer to the truth, I am not as upset as he is about the divinizing of Jesus. As I said earlier, religion is always in the making; people branch out in different ways from a charismatic founder and the events of his life.

If we look into the history of religions, it has been fairly normal for groups to see their founder as a god or even as divinity incarnate. Notice this penchant also in our own time as political heros are eventually exalted into superhuman entities. There are at least two consequences to this approach: first, it brings the seemingly distant mystery of divinity very close to people -- God as son and brother. It allows people a tremendous sense of contact with the divine. Secondly, it can greatly bolster the stock of the religious organization (church) that considers itself to be God's chosen, and it certainly makes church officials look good. So if one takes this development from the standpoint of the evolution of religions and from the perspective of metaphorical theology, it is an understandable route to take. But this avenue has distinct drawbacks, because it tend to take away from Jesus real humanity --confused, struggling, defective, vulnerable. Many people find that they can get closer to God by the example of a leader who was a human like themselves, or perhaps, just as divine as they are (remember my point about the sacredness of all reality), but a leader who was able to manifest spiritual qualities in an extraordinary way..

A vision of the priest/minister as a spiritual seeker goes against the grain of the older picture of Catholic priesthood. Although the priest of old had his personal problems, as a priest he was less a seeker than a man already in possession: of special sacramental powers through ordination, of the true doctrine, and of a sacral status far above the laity. Jesus wasn't such a priest; he wasn't a representative of the one, true church, or better, the one true synagogue. Nor did Jesus ordain anyone; ordination was a later church development. But this brings up the question of who should be specially commissioned by ordination in the new era? Relatively inexperienced young men or persons who have been on a serious spiritual path as seekers? Jesus was very much an outsider to organized religion. It is much truer to say that he was a layman; for many he wasn't even a respectable rabbi or teacher. What I am touching on here points to the major crisis of the whole clerical structure of the Catholic Church today. It isn't just celibacy, although that is an important element of the crisis. It is rather the collapse of the older priestly identity and the ascendancy of the laity that is bringing about the end of the clergy as we have known it. We will probably have to live for some time with clergy-laity distinctions. That is not all bad, since it has been useful to allow some members of the community to have specialized education in religion. But as spiritual seekers, priest and layman are on equal footing; they can be spiritual mentors to one another.

Jesus as spiritual seeker lived on the periphery of established religion; he was gradually discovering for himself in contact with other Hebrews and with strangers where God was leading him. One can hear him listening for his own personal direction as he speaks enigmatic parables. Things were not always clear to him. He had a central religious insight that God's domain was already present within people and nature, that reality was already holy in its ordinariness. In another era, he might have met Buddha. What a discussion there would have between two spiritual seekers about enlightenment, impermanence, the importance of living in the present and being interconnected compassionately to all things. Jesus seemed to do more private meditating than he did public rites; Buddha would have been most interested in hearing about Jesus's contemplative experiences, since Buddha always insisted that spiritual practice and experience was far more important that right doctrine and lofty concepts. Jesus walking his own spiritual path sharing it with others did not see himself as the object of faith any more than did the Buddha. Jesus was seeking God, not his own divinizing; such is the picture we get in those parts of the New Testament that reflect more truly the Judean sage rather than the church's divine master.

The priest/minister of tomorrow will be a spiritual guide. But such guidance will have to come primarily from her own inner experiences and her personal life encounters, not from handing down rules and theories from ecclesiastical authority. There is virtually no moralizing in the Jesus of the parables and aphorisms. His stories bespeak a powerful revolution, a metanoia that was going on in himself. These narratives are about the singular experience of God's domain right now in the world and in human hearts. He seems convinced that when people also experience that for themselves, they will open their hearts to beauty and to right conduct. He has confidence that awakened souls can figure things out for themselves. (Although ethical guidelines issue from all religious movements, ethics is basically a universal human endeavor, a personal and group effort through the trials and errors of history to propose ways of enhancing life. Christianity and other religions add certain nuances to human ethics, but for the most part, religions do not invent ethics; they take up much that was already established. A significant problem for many thoughtful priests today is the church's demand that they uphold ethical teachings with which they do not agree.)

Much of what passes for spiritual guidance in the church today comes through preaching and personal counseling. Priests for the most part engage in the former, while some with the right therapeutic training guide people in pastoral counseling. While all of this has its place, I would suggest that half of the time devoted to liturgies and preaching would be much better spent teaching people how to meditate, how to enter the contemplative path. But this requires that the spiritual guide be both well educated in contemplative ways and that he or she be a practitioner of the contemplative life. The church gives little evidence on the whole that it believes in the mystical potential of every person. We in the West can learn a great deal from Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist wisdom and techniques on meditation. From a trans-traditional perspective, the priest guide would be joining these approaches to the western tradition of meditation. Jesus not only worked toward the interiorization of religion, but he also believed that everyone could have an unbrokered relationship with God, that religious organizations were secondary to the actual experience of God's presence in the world. On this level of spiritual experience, the guide is only an equal of the guided. There are no privileged positions by ecclesiastical rank. In the contemplative realm, one finds democracy not hierarchy; this is the heart of what Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza calls "the discipleship of equals." Jesus, the Judean sage, would have laughed at the church's ecclesiastical distinctions of rank with their pompous trappings and pitiful imitation of mundane power and privilege.

In the context of trans-traditional spirituality, both minister and layperson are called upon to be healers for inward life and for relationships with others and with nature. A healer is one who works as a catalyst for wholeness within the soul often torn by warring desires, unhealed wounds from the past and false expectations about life. This work of inner healing is a task of re-connecting or re-weaving painfully disparate strands of our divided selves. Reconnecting the embattled self does not mean reducing persons to a placid common denominator personality by taking important tensions out of their lives. On the contrary, the healer endeavors to awaken others to their wounds, a work of self-knowledge, and she helps to bring disconnected parts of the personality into creative tension/dialogue with one another. The healer must start, however, with a conviction that people have sacred centers into which they can tap for their own healing, that the ordinary is already full of spiritual potential. Such an approach differs significantly from an earlier sin-based theological mindset of the clergy which depreciated human capacity for self-healing. People were so sin-ladened that they needed the special, hierarchical direction to achieve salvation or wholeness. As I said earlier, a presupposition of trans-traditional spirituality is the intrinsic sacredness of humans and nature as a starting point. This basis for healing rejects the sin-based theology still pervasive in much of Christianity. Moreover, the healer must undergo his or her own process of wound healing before becoming an adequate catalyst for the healing of others. In this realm, only the wounded doctor heals. Again, this raises the question of who should qualify as priests in the church. As I pointed out last year in San Diego, Jesus, as spiritual friend, portrayed a healer who did not approach human disconnectedness with the condemnatory perspective of a sin-based theology.

The healer's task of fostering connections moves beyond the individual to families and communities. The priest\minister, as representing organized churches, has his or her role to play in such communal healing. But we need to realize that priest as community healer is being played out in many other areas of society. We see this in the very intentional spirituality of family therapists like Dorothy Becvar, whose new book Soul Healing (Basic Books, 1997), is an excellent example of trans-traditional spirituality. Yet even without such explicit references to the "cure of souls," therapists, social workers, mediators, diplomates and those in many other professions are trying to break down barriers between people, between races and between nations, In as much as they are shaping new connections across old chasms of misunderstanding and prejudice, such persons resonate with Jesus, the healer, who attempted to connect people across the lines of their enmities, their institutional turf-defending and their ideological divisions. In this sense, we are all priests when we mediate toward enhanced human connections.

I would like to conclude these reflections on trans-traditional spirituality by underscoring a healing aspect of Jesus' activities in the New Testament, his ministry of the open table. Our Catholic idea of a sacred table focuses on the mass; other Christians perform similar eucharistic rites. These important rituals developed in the early church as memorials of Jesus. But in as much as the New Testament reflects the religion of the Judean sage, Jesus, there is very little if anything about ritual meals. There is a great deal in these scriptures however, about Jesus eating with all sorts of people. Jesus liked to eat out. He was a good conversationalist and was invited to dine by various folk at the end of a long day of itinerant teaching and doing. He didn't seem to turn down invitations to parties; nor was he big on fasting. Yet his practice of an open table , far from excluding people, crossed over existing lines of respectability. We see him approached by supposed sinners at table, and he was notorious for dining with disreputable types. Eating together implies conviviality; as we take food from the earth to sustain ourselves, we also make connections with others at table: conviviality, making-life-together, sharing across the barriers of our aloneness. The eating itself was sacred for Jesus at an open table. Perhaps church liturgists could take a lesson from this. Why not come together and just eat a meal, sharing with a variety of people. Perhaps there could be a very brief rite at the end, as in the earliest church. What a relief this would be for perplexed liturgists trying to make the mass interesting and attractive. What a solace this would be for so many Christians who find the mass tediously repetitious with the added agony of many sermons. Then we could make something special of four or five extended masses a year commemorating metaphorically the main events of the liturgical calendar. (But I can see that you are not ready to elect me pope.) Am I speaking only for people of my jaded spiritual temperament? Are there any other Taoist Christians like me who would rather be communing with God in a garden, or in the semi-lotus position, or over a good pasta and wine with friends from many traditions?

In the end, trans-traditional spirituality is a way for you and me, as persons who want to be seekers, guides and healers to re-discover the seeking, guiding, healing Jesus who preached his powerful experience of God now, here, everywhere. This experience of Jesus is interestingly close to a governing insight of the modern scientist, Gregory Bateson: "I surrender to the belief that my knowing is a small part of a wider integrated knowing that knits the entire biosphere or creation...Mind and Nature form a necessary unity, in which there is no mind separate from body and no god separate from his creation." (fr. Dorothy S. Becvar, Soul Healing, Basic Books, 1997, p. 25)

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