Integrating Our Interspiritual Dialogues With a Lifelong Practitioner

				Opening Minds, Opening Hearts Season 3 Episode 10

with Sr. Mary Margaret Funk

Episode Title: Integrating Our Interspiritual Dialogues With a Lifelong Practitioner

 

Colleen: Welcome. 

Mark: Hello, Colleen. 

Colleen: Hi, Mark. Hi, everyone. 

Mark: Here we are again. 

Colleen: Yes, here we are again. With our last guest for this season, it's unbelievable how all of a sudden it's over. 

Mark: It's all over. (Yeah, I know.) It's been a wonderful season.

It's not over, but it's been a wonderful season having all these conversations across different religious and spiritual traditions, making new friends. It's been so wonderful. 

Colleen: Yes, it's always a gift of these conversations is new relationships that are formed. And hopefully with the audience and those who are listening, too, we appreciate your comments and your questions.

Not that we will have answers to them, but so much of dialogue, and especially apropos to this season, interspiritual dialogue, is about the questions, not the answers - the willingness to ask the questions and be comfortable with the curiosity that makes for expanding our relationships with people from worlds that are not familiar to us. So, thank you to everyone listening. 

Mark: For me, there's been this real opening up. Over the years, I've gone through this kind of tension, maybe, I don't know if it's tension, but of having a strong desire to go deeper in my own Christian contemplative tradition, and then also opening up to other traditions, especially when I started studying mindfulness meditation, and then drawing from the Buddhist tradition. This dynamic of, am I spreading out too far, is it adultery in that real traditional sense of the word, debasing by addition, like adding more? But I'm finding it's reaffirming this idea that there are connecting points across, and when we open up to other traditions, we're also deepening our own.

It's reaffirming for me, anyway. 

Colleen: Yeah, we're deepening in our own tradition, absolutely. And that was something I think I remember reading about in the Common Heart, the transcript of these dialogues, that everyone who came was grounded in their own faith tradition. They were not universalists in that sense.

They were deeply faithful to their tradition and open to learning. I think that comforts me because I've had similar struggles when I'm having conversations, interspiritual conversations, just casually with friends, especially when I lived in Los Angeles. There was just a multitude of spiritualities. I couldn't explore all of them because I was just discovering the history of Christian monasticism and there's no end to that journey of the mystics and how could I then also deepen in some other area and I just had to grow in my contentment of this is my place. And then that openness of that curiosity about another's and acceptance that we all have our own path. 

Mark: Yeah. And the going deep is the whole idea—deep calls to deep. You start to recognize yourself in the other traditions as well. And our guest today is really the perfect person to be talking about all of this, especially the interreligious dialogue, and also coming from a deep tradition she's made a commitment to for many years now. So, shall we get to introducing our guest to our audience? (Yes.) 

Today we're going to be speaking with Sister Mary Margaret Funk, Sister Meg, who has been a member of Our Lady of Grace Monastery in Beech Grove, Indiana, since 1961.

Talk about going deep. She was a Prioress there from 1985 to 1993, and in '94 she became the Executive Director of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue Board. In that capacity, she coordinated the 1996 Gethsemane Encounter and the Benedict's Dharma Interreligious Dialogue Conferences. Remember, Gethsemane is where Thomas Merton lived in a monastery there, and so there was this gathering there.

She's also spoken to the world's Parliament of Religions, traveled to India and Tibet on spiritual exchange programs, and has been in formal dialogue with people of the Hindu, Zen Buddhist, Islamic, Confucian, and Taoist traditions. Sister Meg has been involved in many retreats, giving them to monastics and lay ministers on Christian practice.

She also served on the board of Thomas Keating's Contemplative Outreach, this group that we are, where this podcast is produced from. She currently directs the School of Lectio Divina at Benedict Inn, which is adjacent to the monastery where she lives. So, she's deeply involved in both interspiritual and inter-religious dialogues, as well as has gone deep into her own Christian contemplative tradition.

And she was doing all that before it was cool to do it. So, with delight, welcome, Sister Meg. 

Colleen: Welcome. 

Sr. Meg: Thank you. I'm very honored to be here, and the topic is intriguing, as well as I want to honor my unbelievably graced relationship with Abbot Thomas Keating. Again, we were together about 10 years in a pretty ongoing way, so.

Colleen: Yeah, and we look forward to hearing some about that relationship. Maybe that's a good place for us to start with you, is can you talk about your relationship, how it was that you came to be in relationship with Father Thomas? And then I know you have a lot prepared that you want to share with us. So any way that that segues into some of what you brought for us today?

Sr. Meg: Thank you. When I became Prioress, I realized that I didn't know monastic tradition. So I wrote for a Lilly Endowment grant. A couple hundred thousand dollars worth of retrieve, reclaim, and reappropriate monasticism for women. And so as a whole community, 103 of us, we studied, and I got a mentor, one of my professors at Catholic U, Mary Collins, and she told me to go see Thomas Keating and learn Lectio Divina.

So I had the Lilly money. You know, all these things have to come together, or I'm surprised myself if you want to know the truth. Anyway, I trot out the format, which is beautiful, and I say to Thomas, I want to learn Lectio Divina. And how to meditate. And he wasn't keen about  Lectio Divina Scripture. He said that gets me into all kinds of troubles.

But he would teach me Centering Prayer. And I did. I did learn. And I took several intensives. And then being Prioress, I brought him here at the monastery at Beach Grove. And so we did many retreats together. And then I kept saying, well, I want to still know more about meditation than just Centering Prayer.

So he said, well, get on the board of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. And he happened to be the chairman. So again, I thank Thomas for learning to meditate. Being a part of the Monastic and Religious Dialogue Board, which I was the executive director for 10 years, which means I was directly in the dialogues with these other religions, coordinating the events, and again, I can't exaggerate, I got to talk to each of the participants just myself, inviting them, coming, so it's been extraordinarily rich.

I coordinated the Tibetan exchange, where the Tibetan monks and nuns came from Northern India, basically, and then came here, and monasteries in the United States. And so, then, we had seven valleys of that dialogue, and the last one, His Holiness came to Gethsemane. That was number seven. And so, coordinating 200 of his closest friends.

So, you have to think about commonalities besides learning to meditate. The interreligious dialogue and that whole thing is that he netted the Contemplative Outreach participants are the best people I know. We're all practitioners, and we're on the journey, and it just put us all together in a very wholesome and realistic way of how hard it is.

And that was lay and religious and priest. And then finally, I'd have to say, I was on some speaking engagements with Thomas and his publisher came to me and said, our marketing research needs a woman. Can you write us something? And I said, what do you want? And they said, anything just happened to be a woman.

So I had two books, I said, which one do you want? And the first book I wrote was Thoughts Better, which would be the parallel teaching about training of the mind of the Buddhists and the Hindus. So again, I started right out with the classic teaching. Again, when I was doing the history and the retrieving of the monastic tradition, I found that Saint Benedict and I'm a Benedictine nun, we follow the Benedictine rule, he quoted John Cashin, an early desert writer, born in 366.

He quoted him 150 times. So then I became very interested in John Cashin and actually What Thoughts Matter. That's how I found the Christian tradition on training of the mind. And that's what this book is. And it expanded to five books, and I can tell you more about that. So then I became a representative on the dialogue at various places.

The Christian training of the mind, and then the Dalai Lama would do the Buddhist, and then we'd have Hindu gurus, the Swamis. I have so much affinity and regard for and love for Thomas. 

Colleen: Yeah. And I'm curious, so the Christian training of the mind, we've learned, I think it was from Cynthia, Mark, that early on when Father Thomas was developing the method, that there were some concerns that it was a little too close to other traditions or not distinct enough from another meditation tradition.

I wonder how you might have experienced the method of Centering Prayer. And the way of training the mind in relation to the Zen way or the way of the Hindus. Are there subtleties and what is the distinction for the Christian practice? 

Sr. Meg: Okay, that's a very fine question. And again, Thomas did get some blowback because he did pick up this mode from a Zen sitting, Sashin, sitting for hours and then walking. But then the training of the mind to his is to have a sacred word that you don't go up the train of thoughts. The sacred word centers the mind back into no thought is the goal. Again, it's a genius, and it's very Christian in its particularity because it's still, you bring yourself toward Christ.

And you don't negate any of the Christian teachings. In fact, your mind just comes clear and your body becomes more agile and at peace to receive the revelatory text. But I'm going to segue, I'm going to skip about 20 years of my life and tell you what happened as I got into this dialogue, and I continue to have a lot of Centering Prayer people in conversation.

So what has happened to all of us, I would say, is a great respect for the Eastern traditions and their particularity. We still are struggling with a language that is respectful. And one thing I've learned is the complexity is completely beyond anyone's competence. So we are learning all the time how vast, how distinct, how many are all these lineages. Tibet alone has six lineages. And they're very different from each other. 

And then the other thing you learn when you, like say, Zen has two big lineages, the Rinzai and the Soto, but it depends on what country they're from. The Japanese and the Koreans are very different. And so there's a multitude of practices that are culturally conditioned.

So you have to learn what's Zen and what's just the culture that comes with it. And in the Catholic tradition, same way. Franciscans, Benedictines, Dominicans. We all bring a culture to the table, and so you have to separate out to retrieve, bring it all up, reclaim that which is necessary today, and then re-appropriate it.

So my work has been, I'm going to fast forward to my very latest thing, because, alright, now this is Patanjali. He's a school of yoga training through aphorisms, Patanjali. And he wrote the Yoga Sutras. But Swami Nida could not— this is Hindu tradition. One time I was coordinating a workshop on Hindu and monastic dialogue, Christian monastic dialogue.

And a Hindu woman in her beautiful sari from India came to me and said, Sister Meg, do you want to learn about Hinduism? I said, yes, I do. Little did I know, that means I will be your teacher. She took me on as her assistant, and I traveled with her for five years. I was in Intermonastic Dialogue, but she wanted me to learn from living gurus that had a lineage from Swami Vivekananda.

So I went to the Vedanta Society here in California. And then in India, we went to five traditions, really, in Hinduism. Basically, the big four are Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Vraja Yoga, and Gyana (Jnana) Yoga. Okay, now I'm going to go back to Swami Vivekananda. He was the first Hindu that came to the United States in 1893.

And he was a disciple of Satya Dananda. But anyway, he came up with the four yoga models. And so it's Karma Yoga, and Bhakti Yoga, And Raja Yoga, and Gyana (Jnana) Yoga. Alright, so he took the Patanjali Sutras and opened them up for Christians or for Westerners. Now, what I did, just a year or two ago, I decided we needed to put together the Christian tradition yoga. 

What's the yoga in the Christian tradition? Karma, Bhakti, Raja. So I wrote a whole book. The book has each one of those paths. The reason why I'm bringing it up to you in this talk on Unitive Consciousness is that you can get to Unitive Consciousness from any one of those paths. But it would be helpful to know if you're Karma, Bhakti, Raja, or Gyana (Jnana) Yoga.

And the meditators are usually Gyana Yoga or Raja. But there's also, through the path of work and the path of love, you can get to this unit of consciousness. And then I did a study of, in the Christian tradition, what saints represent each one of those paths. And so then I did portraits of people that taught us those paths.

Anyway, the book got rejected.

Colleen: Just when I was going to say, where can I buy the book? 

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we want that book. Get back to it. 

Sr. Meg: See, that's why I'm interested in you. You're asking the right question. You really are. This is the question of our time. But I outran my readers. 

Mark: Maybe it's time to come back to it, but I have a question about, you know, so Your Thoughts Matter, and you just mentioned consciousness, and there's this quote by Thomas Keating, That We May Be One.

He says, just by living and growing in consciousness, we are becoming, growing in God's self, in God's presence, in God consciousness. The ultimate consciousness is total oneness, in which God is all in all. And in light of that quote, I'm wondering that what you started with in terms of what we do with thoughts and what different traditions do with thoughts, it seems that one of the distinctions, at least that Keating made, was Centering Prayer is a practice of intention, and many other practices are practices of attention.

And I'm wondering if that sort of rings a bell for you, or if you even see a distinction there in terms of what we're doing with thoughts and how that leads to this idea of actually being conscious in God. 

Sr. Meg: I would say consciousness, one time I was in the room with the Dalai Lama, and he just looked at us and he said, What we're still struggling with is what is consciousness?

My working definition of it myself is, know that we know. And know that we are known. And yet the ultimate gurus of consciousness, like Ramana Maharshi, would say, there's no knower and no known. You just get beyond even those three distinctive voices. But we have to start, I'm going to go back again, we start by being a practitioner.

That cuts off the folks that are just teaching about something. We are actually doing something with our own minds. And descending into our own hearts and relating to God as God comes to us as a revelatory text. And the other, real respect, all these other traditions are revelatory texts. They're sacred just like mine is sacred.

So mine is particular, theirs is particular. And so we don't spend any time on is it true or not true, or is it authentic. Zero. That's not even on the table. So what we share are two things. One is consciousness and the training of consciousness. And then we share the experience of inquiry. And the experience of actually reaching the set point where we experience being on the other side of the inquiry, which would be Presence.

Again, what I did in this manuscript, I took all the practices that I knew that were taught in the Christian tradition, the Little Way, Recollection, Practice of the Presence. I took about 15 of the Christian practices and then showed how you start with the right effort, and then how you have a breakpoint.

First of all, it's strenuous effort. Then there's a breakpoint for right effort. And eventually, there's no effort, although I don't know anybody there. I know that it is, but nobody would proclaim that there's no effort. On the other end, most practitioners would proclaim that they've experienced this awakening, this unitive experience that we're all one. And that all is well. There's a very positive thing. Even if you're into the Hinduism with Shiva God, it's still a good thing that destruction creates the next phase of creation. 

Colleen: Okay, here's something that is coming up for me, and it's been a thread throughout all of our conversations, but we haven't had an opportunity really to discuss it.

So when you say consciousness - know that we are known, and then this movement to no knower when we're looking at Father Thomas's later teachings and his poetry in The Secret Embrace, he's arriving there too in his later teachings and writings. The question that emerges for me is also connected to one of these points of agreement that came from the Snowmass Conferences. Number five says the potential for human wholeness, or in other frames of reference, Enlightenment, Salvation, Transcendence, Transformation, Blessedness is present in every human being, the potential for human wholeness.

Then it makes me curious about the ground from which other traditions engage the spiritual life in the contemplative journey. So, Father Thomas illuminated this false-self, true-self journey. We are growing into our true-self and also that prayer is relationship with God. So, for the Christian contemplatives, this journey is from separate self to union with God or Unitive Consciousness.

But what is the equivalent starting and ending point for other faith traditions where there's either no god, like Buddhism, or in Hinduism where there are many gods? So this is a big thought that I'm holding and offering you to reflect on, but it's almost like, what is the human condition? What's the common starting ground, and where are we heading if not to God?

If there is no knower, then ultimately, where are we going? What are we unifying with? 

Sr. Meg: The Matter series has five books. And one of the books is Lectio Matters. Most of these traditions have an authentic revelatory text. The Quran, the Dhammapada, the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas. So there's these revelatory texts.

But we learn to read these revelatory texts, and this goes way back to Origen, who died in the year 200. We're talking right after Christ and then this apostolic period. They call it Late Antiquity. Alright, he believed in the spiritual senses of a text. So, I did a lot of study. Basically, a scholar by the name of Andre de Labacque has several volumes on reading the scriptures through the spiritual senses.

So, anyway, in the book on Lectio Divina, I have four voices received by four senses. The first sense is you read the literal text. What does it say? Received by your logical senses. And again, if you just stay with that, it becomes fundamentalism, you know? You take it all literally. So then the next level to read the text is the symbolic voice.

It is received by the intuitive senses, where you just slurp it in as a whole, you get it, and then the facts come later. So much of, let's say, the Book of Genesis, that's a symbolic story, sold thousands of years later, projecting into God the Creator. You have to read it as a literary masterpiece. Okay, the third level of reading a text is the moral level, the moral voice, and is received by the personal senses.

And this is very important. The personal senses is the one that receives and fights with all our afflictions. Food, sex, things, anger, dejection, acedia, vainglory, and pride. So the eight classic afflictions. So the moral voice and the personal senses, but these personal senses can get on the other side of those afflictions.

But then the fourth voice is the mystical voice. And that's the voice of Unitive Consciousness. That's in every tradition and in every practice and in everybody, they all have a moral voice. But what is lacking that I'm working on now with, or other people are teaching me, frankly, it's received by the spiritual senses.

Now, Centering Prayer with meditation awakens those spiritual senses. Good mindfulness awakens it. What we need, I think, is to be more at home with our spiritual senses, both with their limitations and their vastness. But when you say you experience the whole, or you're psychologically, I'm not sure we ever mature, but I think we get to the stage it's good enough.

I do the nautics one time. This is it. You're not going to get anybody better. I'm alright. And I'm alright with myself. So anyway, the mystical voice needs a lot more training in the spiritual senses.

 (Gentle music starts...) 

In the Christian tradition, contemplative prayer is the opening of your mind and heart. to God, who is beyond thoughts, words, and emotions. Centering Prayer is a method designed to facilitate contemplation. The method suggests four guidelines. One, choose a sacred word as the symbol of your intention to consent to God's presence.

And action within you. Two, sit comfortably and relatively still. Close your eyes or leave them slightly open. And silently introduce your sacred word. Three, when you notice you have become engaged with a thought, Simply return, ever so gently, to your sacred word. And four, at the end of the 20-minute prayer period, let go of the sacred word and remain in silence for a couple of minutes.

The additional time invites you to bring the atmosphere of silence into everyday life.

(Gentle music fades out...) 

Mark: One thing, Sister Meg, as you're speaking about that engaging the text, the sacred text in this practice, at least from our tradition, what we would call Lectio Divina.

It sounds very dynamic to me. Maybe at times it's linear, but then other times it's not. There's this movement that goes back and forth. I'm curious from your own experience, and you've written so much about this, and you're deeply steeped in this as a practice, it sounds to me, that where is that balance, or how do we work with that as a practice, where there's this active part, you could get— I know I've done it in Lectio, where I'm studying the text, and then I can get caught up in that.

So, how do we work with that dynamic of looking and doing the text, and then letting the text be, and let the text do us in a sense? When it comes down to the practice itself. 

Sr. Meg: I love when you said when the text works on us. Again, Lectio Divina is a way, there are three revelatory texts. One is your own experience, another is nature, and another is a scripture of some sort.

And it even could be somebody else's writing, like Thomas's writing. What you're doing, I had that book too. This is a book That We May Be One. That's a Lexio of Thomas's writings on the unitive voice. So again, we ask the Holy Spirit, What text do you want me to... God is coming toward us, really. We don't need to seek God.

We just need to open our eyes and see what's really between our eyes, hitting us over the head, saying, What do you want of me? And then that text, I read it, study it a little bit, but as soon as I start fighting with the text, with my intellect, Stop. That's a stop. That's a dead-end. And, for example, my most recent book show, to be honest, is on quantum physics.

This book, Order of Time, by Carlo Rovelli. And it's changed my language. Again, I've done Thoughts Matter for many years, and I'm just now understanding that thoughts are a matter. They're electrons. Actually, they become matter, motion, energy, light. The discipline I need, not only in my prayer time of my thoughts but in my daily walking around.

Because I can contaminate or I can lift up, I can bless, or like even this Zoom, our thoughts are engaged. We are entangled. And it's just exciting to me that we've got such a relationship already. 

Mark: Yes, it's beautiful. So it's not getting rid of thoughts. It's not saying, think about them for a while and then drop them all together.

It's how we are engaging with them. 

Sr. Meg: Exactly. I'm not into physics, but let it work on me. And I studied the glossary. There's about 20 new words here for me. So I went into it, and then I see it all over the place. Like right now, the three of us have never met, but there's something going on. Isn't that amazing?

Colleen: It is. Yeah. And this idea that thoughts are matter when I think about the practice of letting go of thoughts, whether it's in Centering Prayer or my analytical thoughts that might try to disrupt my Lectio practice, the power in almost allowing the Holy Spirit to intervene so that a thought cannot become a negative energy so that they can pass through, they can be released without being alchemized into some afflictive emotion.

Sr. Meg: You're naming it very, very well. I shouldn't even comment because you've just said it so strongly and so well. In one sense, thoughts come and thoughts go, and we're not our thoughts, but we can see them and we can read them. And if we don't think about them, they go away, like in Centering Prayer, but it still happens in daily consciousness.

But what you just did is very pleasing to me. We need God. We need God because of the human condition. We need God as a partner, an ongoing— see, and this is where it is duality a bit, insofar as I'm not God, but there's nothing that's not God either. But I need, as a creature of God, to be directed. What you described, Colleen, is discernment.

Sorting out your thoughts and letting the Holy Spirit guide you down the path of the thoughts. Again, and then when you do, the simpatico and the union and the delight of being on the right track with the right people and hear these amazing things. You know, it's not an awakening of nothing. It's quite something.

Colleen: Let's talk a little bit about Awakening. What did you bring for us that may be helpful for Mark and I and our listeners around this subject for this season of Unitive Consciousness? Is there anything that we haven't touched on that you feel now might be a good time to teach us? 

Sr. Meg: Okay, I'm going to just say three kind of unconnected things.

When we were in Tibet, we had a translator, and every time we used the word God, they would say Sangha, Guru, and Dharma. So there's no word for God, there are deities, different realms, in Tibetan, but there's no God. But what I would say is find like-minded souls, the Sangha, that is on the journey with you, and that's why those prayer groups are important, to stay faithful to your practice.

And then, your practice should be both a meditation practice for under the river, and that's my jargon for the interior life, but then you need probably a teacher or text or some help for above the river. Are you a path of work, a path of love, a path of being, a path of truth? And if you are, find the practices above the river that sustain you and keep you centered.

And you're right, that book should be published because that's what it's about.

I'll be glad to send you the manuscript. (Please do.) And anybody else, to be honest. 

Mark: Yeah, wonderful. I want to ask about this process, this transformation that's going on, that is really the work of God, it seems, that we participate in, but we're not actually orchestrating it. Because one of the things that shows up there, we mentioned that the human condition comes into play, and afflictive emotions and Keating talks about this, that we have to accept our illness, we've got to go towards that, and of course, it's very strong in Buddhism too, that there is suffering, and how we work with that, and how that's part of the transformation that's going on, not eliminating, at least not in my experience, all the suffering, but I'm wondering if you could say more about the human condition in light of suffering, and how we work with that.

Maybe even what you've gained from hearing Buddhists talk about that, and being engaged in that as well there. 

Sr. Meg: I have a teaching on the human condition too. Thomas takes several of the spiritual journey on the human condition. And he uses Abba Anthony and all that. Okay, I'd like to think of a circle, cut that circle in half, and that one half of that circle, this is talking about, what agency do you have?

Half of it is determined by primordial and cultural, anthropological conditioning. It's determined. We happen to be Americans, this civilization, this time. But it does determine a lot and there's very little we can do about it, if anything. Then take the other 90 degrees of the circle, cut that in half, then there's your family of origins.

And that controls your DNA, it actually controls your addictions, it controls your propensities, your habits of family, going back to seven generations. So that's called generational conditioning, or determinants, or sin if you want to call it. And then, take another slice of your, let's say about 5 or 10 percent.

That conditions you right now as your personal sin. You haven't always been on message. You've done this, you've done that. And your brain and your body could go that way again without much control. So there's your own personal stuff that you carry around with you. So then that just leaves a little wedge of that whole circle that is fully free for your mind to accept and reject and go this way and not that way.

You really only have a little 10, 15 percent freedom. And I often, when I teach this, I have a brother who lets me say he's bipolar, he's gay, he's Republican. And he has about 5 percent because he's got to stay on his medication. I've got more. But how I know this teaching is true, I teach in a monastery, and there are always hermits that live around monasteries.

So I always get a day or two with the hermits. And when I teach this, I say, I thought that was it because I've got my own cat, my own house, my own food, my own time. And I'm still determined. I only have just such a little bit. Now, that could be depressing, but it's not. That means that we're just fine and we're doing very well with what we've got.

And to have a right expectation of others, a right expectation of myself, you know, again, humility does matter. We aren't self-determining, actually. We are a self that, through God's grace, can move in this direction or that direction. And again, I don't like the word will. If you just will it, you can do it wrong. 

 Then, actually, when you get one with yourself and one with others and on the other side of the inflections, it's amazing what God does through you. When you look at Thomas Keating's life, look what he did. And look what Contemplative Outreach has done. In 2, 000 years, it has put in common domain a Christian meditation practice.

That's no small thing. So I get this human condition circle from the Orthodox. It makes a lot of sense. There are two books that I would say to you on the mystical tradition. It's Gregory of Nyssa, it's the story of Moses, and then John Cashin has about three chapters on mystical experience out of a thousand pages.

It's very slim but very true. Anyway, Cashin is more earthy and down to the point where you fall all the time and have to be on guard and watch your thoughts, but it's very sobering. But  Gregory of Nyssa is very, the mysticism of light. And again, the problem with mysticism of light, and I'm speaking for myself, is that you don't know if the self is yourself or the me-self.

There is no clear demarcation between the self, S, the capital S E L F, and God. And then the me-self that's Meg Funk. So I'm always bowing my head, always being tentative in the mystery. And also I don't use the word God anymore. I say the mystery we call God. When people tell me what God is, oh my, it's nowhere near what I think God is.

The word God is so problematic. The word mystery is better. 

Colleen: I wonder if you have some thoughts for us about the place non-duality occupies in the tradition of mysticism and contemplative prayer. In particular, I'll just share what Father Thomas, one of the ways that he defines Christian non-duality, which we learned is a term that we've borrowed, essentially, from other traditions.

But in That We May Be One, Father Thomas says Christian non-duality then is this increasing merging of all our interests and body and soul and emotions into the body of Christ, the new creation, who through the Spirit has given us the source of a new motivation, which comes out of the fruits and gifts of the Spirit.

Your impressions and reflections on Christian non-duality or non-duality more vastly as held in other traditions that you've practiced and been invited to train in? 

Sr. Meg: Okay. I would thank you for that. You've done your homework. That's the key question at hand, is the experience of non-duality. I might back up and say, in the dialogue, we're trying not to use the word non, non-Christian, non So, it is better to just say Unitive Consciousness, I'd say.

We also don't use the word isms or phobias, you know. What I like, the word is particular. Your particular tradition, my particular tradition, and the experience of Unitive Consciousness, or the experience that we have more than in common than what divides us. And again, there's nothing that's not this mystery we call God, so we know that.

And we never judge somebody else's experience. But we do reflect on our own experience, and that's what you're saying. Now, I just reviewed a manuscript for an endorsement, and I sat in this chair and I said, What's wrong with this book? I've got to find something good about it, you know? Well, it was troublesome to me because it was didactic.

It told me all good things from the tradition, and it's just, it's this, it's this, it's this. And again, I didn't think that my experience would say, Yes, that's the conceptual, the literal, but it isn't the experiential response. The experiential is much more humble, much less than that, but we wait upon it.

We don't doubt it, and we just sit in awe at the mystery, but we never think that it's ours. That's really, my guess is, it's another realm. It's not in this realm of me being alive. Now, I do know there's gurus that really go into these states of consciousness, and they're not here. They're just sitting, and they're really not present.

But that isn't so much the Christian tradition. In fact, even in the Hindu, Ananadamayi Ma, she's a guru, and she said you should never lose consciousness in meditation. You should always be. Which means you need to have a sense of yourself, because I am, I am, is, quite an important thing. And then in quantum physics, what quantum means is there's something, not nothing.

There is never nothing. That's what quantum physics tells us. There are granular particles. Even black holes are not nothing. There's really something everywhere, and it's much more distinct and different and moving. Entropy is the word they use. There are all these parts moving along. So back to your question, can we trust the talk?

And the answer is yes and no. That it is. We can stand before that. That's the tradition. But have I ever been there? I'm not sure and I kind of like to just let it be at that. I don't have to judge that I'm there. I've had people come to me and say they're in a dark night of the soul, and I say congratulations.

Tell me what your light of the soul was. So again, I think see, we don't really have gurus that would put us in shape but anyway, we probably ought to refrain from judging where we are and how we are who we are. In fact, the greatest guru of that is Ramana Maharshi is inquiry. I'm not this, I'm not that, I'm not this, I'm not that.

One time I made a retreat on being not this, not that. So I spent three days, I'm not a nun, I'm not a funk, I'm not a woman, I'm not. I went all the way down. Guess what I was when I finally got to my most granular, what was I? What were I? I was just a little plasma. A little hunk of plasma. That's what I got down to.

But this plasma desired God. So I wasn't alone either. This little plasma desired God with my whole heart and with all my little plasma. So again, Colleen, your question is a good one because that is our inquiry. That's what we're longing for. But the response is, and Thomas would say this if he's sitting right here, you are good the way you are.

You don't have to do one more thing because of being already there. He battled the negativity of especially Catholic and Protestant moral teachings. He was sick of it, really. He just said, can't you hear that you're loved and you're just fine and you're already there and you can just sit in the presence?

I can remember him saying that, really. 

Mark: Yeah, that's a hard thing, I think, for a lot of people to give up and say, I'm already loved. It's not anything I'm doing or not doing. In some ways, maybe that's the ego that won't allow for that. It still wants to decide if I'm loved or not loved or something.

But to give that over and just say, this isn't my doing. This is God's doing, or God's essence, even. Not even a doing, maybe. It just is. 

Colleen: And does that sense of unworthiness that in the Christian tradition, which we know Father Thomas taught us about our basic goodness, but in the doctrinal teachings of Christianity, we learn a lot about our sin nature, and it makes resting in that reality of our fineness as we are, challenging.

But is that sin nature present, do you find, in your work in Buddhist communities, in Hindu communities? Is that a common struggle? Is there a sin nature in those traditions, or is that uniquely Christian? Are we all somehow inculturated into this human condition bad? 

Sr. Meg: What I've witnessed is people are covered over with their afflictions.

And if they can, with practice, being a practitioner, move toward laying aside those afflictions and taste the other side of the affliction. And then the affliction is, see, where it says we're not our thoughts, we're not our afflictions either. And you find, see again, non-duality or duality, there is something other than ourselves and we can taste it.

Yesterday I was coming through the refectory and there were two nuns, and I would say our holiest nuns, they were sitting talking and I told them about this podcast this morning. And I said, how old were you when you felt the consciousness of God? And they said they've never not had consciousness of God.

And I would have to say to you too, when I knew of my own thoughts, I knew God was there too. So I've never had the no God. They came together for me. When I was conscious of myself, I was conscious of this God that wasn't myself, but very loving and very caring. And I was like three years old, and I was on the radiator in this hundred-year-old farmhouse, and I kicked my little shoes against the radiator, and I said, what is true?

What I see out there or what's in here? I was asking at three. What was the real and they were both real, but I'm answering your questions about presence people somehow get covered over, but I think if they would go back to their genetic moment when they first woke up to themselves they would also have this presence that held them, knew them, loved them. But I do think Mark people lose that and it's terrible.

It's existential dread. It's very very harsh and especially young men really just don't have a connection with themselves or with this Presence, that is the mystery we call God. 

Mark: Yeah, it's that Unitive Consciousness, I guess you were talking about, that is just there. It's not even me trying to connect with that at some point.

It just becomes whatever term we would use for that, communing, or just what you said, presence. It's just being aware of that, I guess, you know. 

Colleen: And what they eventually grounded themselves in common connection in the Snowmass conference is Ultimate Reality. 

Sr. Meg: The ultimate, concerning the ultimate. You know, and we have to be very patient.

I was in Sissu at a meeting, and I was with a Buddhist. And I was taught, using the word presence, and he said, you know, in Japanese, we don't have a word presence. We only have chi. We only have energy. So again, we might need to sharpen our senses again if there's some work we need to do. Definitely, this mystery we call God is there.

Now, to drop out of that question of there or not there, that I think is not worth our time, frankly. But we need to sharpen our own experience of this mystery we call God, this union, this consciousness. Again, I've got some people in dialogue now that we're trying to talk about our spiritual senses. And every day, we're doing a journal, like, when did our spiritual senses detect something?

What's important, I turned 81 this week, and I live with 45 nuns, and a lot of them are elderly, you know, there are 20 nuns older than me. And this whole old age has got to have a purpose. So I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't we lose our sight, our hearing, our mobility, but what about our spiritual senses?

Are they opening up kinder and more loving and more sensing this and seeing this and putting together this? The spiritual senses, I think, are the agenda for elderly people. And so that's my next book. 

Colleen: Sister Meg, thank you so much for, not just this conversation, the writings that you're doing, the communities and conversations you're having.

You're traveling and you're really living humility and being a student of these other traditions. I'm not sure how much your travel is continuing, but maybe that's a good place for us to wrap up. What is happening for you right now? Where could maybe we share space with you? Are you offering retreats or workshops?

How do we stay in community with you? 

Sr. Meg: I do have something to offer and during COVID, a very good co-teacher, Kathleen Cahalan out of Collegeville, we did 320 teachings on a Voicemail on our phones, and it's called St. Inda, and it goes through the four renunciations. They're on the web, they're available to everybody, and they just, one after the other, 320 teachings.

And it goes through the first renunciation, former self, second, your afflictions, third, you renounce your thought of God, because any thought of God is not God. Fourth renunciation, you renounce your thought of self, because, If you're thinking yourself, it's not yourself. It's just a thought of self. So you're much beyond your thought.

But anyway, it's called Saint Inda. And I'd be glad to send the link for you to put out there. And I would say over a thousand people have done Saint Inda. And they're continuing. So it'd be, right now, the best, most comprehensive teachings that I've done. And it's available. And there were more Protestants that took it, more lay people that took it, than nuns and priests.

A lot of Irish, a lot of the scholars, Harvard, Yale, Emory. Again, this early tradition of the desert and the renunciations, you can see Centering Prayer is right in there. But this pulls together the Christian tradition of the interior training of the mind. 

Mark: That sounds wonderful. We'll put that link in our show notes for people to be able to access that.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Sister Meg, for being with us today and for all that you've shared and all that you bring to this conversation and actually to this life, this spiritual life. Thank you so much. 

Colleen: Yeah, a real gift. 

Sr. Meg: Thank you was a privilege.