Fast from Your “Self”
by Rev. Cory Coberforward
Psalm 34:10-14 (responsive reading)
The lions may grow weak and hungry,
but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.
Come, my children, listen to me;
I will teach you the fear of the Lord.
Whoever of you loves life
and desires to see many good days,
keep your tongue from evil
and your lips from telling lies.
Turn from evil and do good;
seek peace and pursue it.
John 5:19-30
Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, and he will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed. For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it. Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him.
“Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.
“Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned. By myself I can do nothing; I judge only as I hear, and my judgment is just, for I seek not to please myself but him who sent me.
Read the written message below with music videos
I can’t help but think it would be amazing if my dog did all the things that I told her to: “Ghost, sit and rest. Ghost, turn around. Ghost, do a backflip! Ghost, take yourself safely on a walk for the next 15 minutes.” Although, it sounds like it might be a bummer for her! But this is exactly what Christ and many wise sages indicate that they do in regard to God. Jesus said, “the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing.” Christ knew that all things that happened are a manifestation of the universal will or what some call “God’s Providence,” but it also means that Christ had awakened to this truth so fully that his mind was perfectly in sync with the Spirit flowing through his mind and around him. Unlike many of us, Jesus was no longer beholden to his fickle yearnings and attachments, nor deep-seated fear or misgivings, although he might have experienced these in passing. Christ says as much himself, “for I seek not to please myself but him who sent me,” inviting us to the same lightness of Spirit by giving in to the flow of Life. And perhaps our relationship with God is even closer and already more aligned than we know, making us less God’s “pets” and more God’s “children.”
How many of us can be said to centre from a place where all of our actions and judgments seek to please Divinity and not ourselves? Can you imagine if our pets did only the things subject to our constant approval, we’d have to be hands-on all the time! But obviously, there’s something different about our relationship with God than the one between “pet” and “owner” – what is it?
God’s will and presence already flow through and around us, even if we don’t know it. This is a truth shared by the core teachings of most major religions, as well as by sages across history. God’s light is our very light, as Christ said, the life that gives forth to what we call our life. We just have a habit of creating a sense of false barriers intellectually and emotionally between ourselves, others, and it. But think about your experience: don’t your body and your thoughts arise in the same aware space that your experience of someone else’s body and sharing arises? Are you more what you perceive or the “thing” perceiving? What’s the difference between your point of awareness and someone else’s, or even your dog’s?
Everything we know appears in us. From who we think we are, our minds and our bodies, to who we think others are. We have no say about what comes to our mind, and yet we often feel like we sit in a place of agency even amidst our constantly changeful, tumultuous mind. Even our sense of “making a decision” and “this is me” is a set of sensations and thoughts that arise to us.
This is what the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg called the “appearance” of free will and our false sense of self. He stated that a sense of our personal free will was an important appearance to allow for life as we know it, and that even evil acts will one day work for good and learning. However, he also believed that as we become more angelic and open to our natural internal state, we also see that there’s only God’s will, and all our hang-ups, selfishness, and internal issues start to fall away under the light of this understanding. This is because a lot of our neediness and fear stem from our false sense of self! When we realize that everything is already God’s will and that all are one, our minds relax and we can become more centered in current moment presence and the peace that we already are at our core.
What a relief! God’s will is already being done, we just have to step into this truth more fully and then God’s goodwill will flow more evidently through and around us. One way to do this is to start to fast from investing in our thinking that carries us away from God’s will for us: the openness of presence, peace, joy, and love.
In the tradition of Lent, modeled after Christ’s fasting in the wilderness, many various Christian churches and traditions spend 40 days avoiding certain habits or practices. This “letting go” of various tendencies and bad habits not only models Christ’s fasting but is also a representation and a type of fulfillment of his teachings about releasing the hold that our desires have on us. For example, our Great-Pyrenees and Lab mix may give up trying to cross the street on her own for 40 days, this would both be a healthy change for her and a greater fulfillment of our will.
But a greater Lenten sacrifice would be if Ghost somehow adopted our mentality and understanding about her safety more generally and “sacrificed” her dangerous habits in full. If she came to see that when we say “Stop!” it’s typically for her bodily safety and that we are often trying to communicate with her in ways that she’s not looking for, let alone begin to understand, she may become more attuned to our will and less to her own. Her will would be more aligned with our will for her - now, that would be something!
And just as employing a better technique to teach our pets has a greater chance at correcting a behaviour, our greatest teachers strive to hit effectively at the heart of our issues in order to help us find true peace, love, and joy. You see, we can go to each branch of our problems and try to lop them off one at a time – but is that truly helping us with our core issue? Does fetishizing becoming rid of a specific desire truly rid us of our tendency to have a monkey on our back? Not typically. However, sometimes in the process of letting go of one specific thing, we develop a greater will and a greater wisdom about our neediness and how we might overcome it. This latter kind of lesson hits more at the root of our problem and it is this kind of understanding and empowerment that our spiritual teachers so often try to convey, even when they seem to be addressing someone’s specific problem. Instead of lopping off limbs, they ask each of us to sacrifice our entire false self.
But Lent isn’t about just giving something up, just as Christ’s fasting wasn’t just about not eating. In general, any fast is meant to teach us how much we already have! Just as a physical fast can teach our body that there are both more resources and more waste than we knew (which is why in studies fasts often have lasting health benefits), the spiritual dimension of a fast can help bring to the forefront both our internal resources and where some waste has accumulated. We learn that we can go without and so our will is strengthened, but also, a part of us registers that there’s no such thing as “going without” – we are always full of the Spirit, full of life, Providence, and the light that everything arises in, so much more than we could ever know!
Peace and love,
Cory