A Living Sacrifice

“...that you present your bodies a living sacrifice...” (Romans 12:1)

In the Kabbalah, a treasure of spiritual understanding, sacrifice is likened to the flame of a candle. The lower part of the flame, closest to the wick, burns blue and sometimes black. The higher part burns white. A radiance exists, if you look closely, that hovers beyond that. 

Sacrifice is a two way street. Fire is met with fire. “For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire” (Deut. 4:24). When we sacrifice (give up) some part of our being that stands in our way of spiritual growth, of heightened transformation of consciousness, this is the burning of blue and black. When we are steady in this burning, the white light and radiance are given to us from above. We become the whole flame. As below, so above and as above, so below. Merge.

What is it that we sacrifice, commit to burning? Each of us knows the answer to that. We need no one to tell us. The general areas that contain elements that need sacrifice (making sacred) are:

- the physical realm (physical actions)
- the emotional realm (anger, despair, jealousy, and so on)
- the mental realm (destructive and obsessive thoughts)
- the social realm (choices of relationship with people and activities)
- the spiritual realm (holier than thou attitudes and judgments).

Why should we do this? We don’t have to. We can remain the way we are: isolated protoplasmic blobs, to use one of my favorite expressions. 

Two main reasons exist for sacrificial action. One is for our ongoing transformation. The other is out of love for The-One-Who-Breathes-Us, who immediately loves us in return, allowing us as candles in the cosmos to burn with bright and radiant light.

A Call

In reading and studying and opening to the insights of Meister Eckhart, particularly as presented by C.F. Kelley in his "Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge," I find a call to a deepened reading of the Bible; deepened because I take it as the Voice of the Transcendent, of God, and of the Godhead. I exercised this deeper intuitive opening earlier in my arising every morning and listening to a deep understanding of each of Jesus' sayings in the Gospel of Thomas. (Those understandings were eventually published in a book.)

I feel like a newborn babe who remembers past lives. I am beginning to read the Bible again as if for the first time. The clamorous voices of secular opinion of the Bible sound off in the distance but they are not my choice as a place to rest my soul and to allow its further growth. Been there, done that. Little, if any, nourishment.

I will use this blog as a reporting arena for my Eckhart-based reading of the Bible. To do so, I must regard the Bible as Divine Word. I start with that supposition and will allow it to convince me further. How? By the degree to which it strengthens and deepens my soul.