January 29, 2023
Text: Matthew 5:1-12
Sources:
Prayers of the Cosmos, Neil Douglas-Klotz, Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus, Harper San Francisco, 1990.
The Healing Breath, Body-Based Meditations on the Aramaic Beatitudes, Sounds True Recording, SoundsTrue.com, 2004
I am going to focus on the first verse of the Beatitudes. And I’ll read to you four different translations:
New Revised Standard Version: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Message: You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God.
First Nations Version: Creator’s blessing rests on the poor, the ones with broken spirits; the Good Road from above is theirs to walk.
Klotz/Aramaic: Now is the blessedly ripe time to find your home in the breathing, to hold onto the breath as if it were your first and last possession. To you belongs the power that no one can take away, that aligns with the One.
As I have grown to realize, and embody, the writings and recordings of Neil Douglas-Klotz, these translations were a game-changer for me in understanding this verse. He wrote that those who followed Jesus were often the homeless, who literally had their only home in their own breath. In Jesus’ time during Roman occupation, many had lost their incomes or were barely getting along. This is a very encouraging set of verses for those people, the dispossessed.
This inner possession is something no one can take away.
Those of us who are rich also have a foothold here into Jesus’ words: Our breath. We are all needing to connect ourselves to the One, and we can do that directly through our breath.
In my own story, I have found a foothold through Jesus’ Aramaic words, through Zen and through the 12 Step Programs, to find my own way of connecting to the Source, to the One, and to my breath.
My old pattern of thinking and behavior takes me to the same place over and over.
In Step One of the 12 steps: I am powerless over my own thinking and behavior. I am poor in spirit. That creates an emptiness inside that makes me yearn for a connection to something greater, something that is healing: the One.
In later steps, I name my mistakes and behaviors which disconnect me from God, and ask to have them cleared out. To make room for new thoughts and behaviors. More emptiness that makes me closer to the Divine.
In Zen, it is outlined this way: there are “Five Conditions” which we confront as humans:
- I am going to grow old
- I am going to get sick
- I am going to die
- Everything and everyone I know is going to leave me
- All I have is my actions.
In the Heart Sutra (Sutra means “a body of guidelines or precepts”), one of the great teachings in Buddhism, it says a follower “clearly saw the emptiness of all these five conditions, thus completely relieving misfortune and pain.” The relief from misfortune and pain comes with accepting this state of the human condition, not fighting it.
Emptiness. Powerlessness. Poor in spirit.
We all can come to this verse, “blessed are the poor in spirit,” through these conditions, and going through and beyond these conditions to our spiritual home in the Breath.
[In the Beatitudes, there is power in what is NOT known. In Jesus’ world, darkness was the unknown, not something bad. So in the beatitudes we look at what is unknown, what is in the dark.]
Now, let’s look at the Aramaic words of this first line of the Beatitudes:
Tubwayhun: Now is the blessedly ripe time. Aligned with the One, Tuned to the Source, Healed/Healthy, Integrated, Renewed.
L’Meskenaee B’rukh: Poor in spirit: to hold onto our breath as if it were our first and our last possession.
D’dilhounhie: To them belongs
Malkutha: the power/queendom (“I Can” vs “I Am”)
D’ashmaya: of heaven (light, sound, vibration, moving and changing through US)
The breath is a way to directly connect with the One, in many religions and spiritual practices. It is a primary way that we are embodied: we Breathe.
Throughout my life, I have searched for ways to be connected with the One, and with ways to be embodied.
May 1955: I was born to a mother who was often “not there”, dissociative. Not present in her own body. I realize this has led me in a life-long journey toward embracing my own embodiment.
December 1966: When I was 11, we kids found a long patch of ice we slid on behind the elementary school — and somehow I fell and must have hit my head. I had a concussion. I remember the patch of ice, I don’t remember falling. I awoke several minutes later, and I was out of my body. I saw myself about 10-15 feet down and ahead, being helped along by a kid on one side and a teacher on the other. I did NOT like being out of my body!
I’ve looked back on that experience many times. What did it mean? One thing was clear: I was determined to come back. I wanted to be in my body.
Summer 1968: Age 13: I’ve shown you all the little turtle I made from clay in my neighborhood’s park when I was thirteen, musing about why I was a white girl born in the 1950s in the US. Clay. We are made of clay. Here in a particular body, in a particular time, in a particular place. That meant something.
Fall 1984: Age 29. I had a vision of myself doing bodywork in the context of psychotherapy. Very clear. I applied for massage school right then. Throughout my career and thirty years doing psychotherapy, I have seen Embodiment as the cornerstone, helping people to stay embodied as they journey through their anxiety, depression, PTSD.
2022: Age 67. I was given the Gift/Role in my mission group as the “Embodied Mystic.” I don’t know what this means! But it is a call to something greater than myself. So I work with it.
Once I get to be in the body, I know there is something larger than that, which is emptiness. “Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness is no other than form”.
Breathing is a form of emptiness. It resides in the form of my body, yet it is not the body. And Yet it is through this body that I know the breath, it hits up against my body, contained and yet free.
When I am tense or tight, there is no space, no room for the emptiness/breath. When I am relaxed, there is space, fluidity. Embodiment with emptiness in between.
2022-present: In the last year I’ve been on a journey to have more of a direct connection with the Divine. It has come from the quiet, the silence, through meditation. By myself, but more often with others. Since 2008, I have belonged to a Zen group and I attend every Wednesday evening, and also attend retreats for a weekend or longer a few times per year.
About a year ago, in a moment of stillness, I heard a still, small voice: “Just be with me, Connie.” Upon hearing it, I immediately relaxed. And everytime I say this phrase inside, I soften. I shift into an alternative consciousness to what I was just experiencing. It starts with words and then shifts to a body experience of those words, the atmosphere of YHWH.
Breathe with me:
YH: Breath in
WH: Breath out
The breath is the focus in so many spiritual traditions. And, with Klotz’s translations, it is clear it is part of our own tradition that we can re-claim.
About a month ago, Nancy McCormack-Pickett told me about a book called The Many Daughters of Afong Moy. Amazing book. I’ll tell you the plot sometime. But, one thing that stood out, was when one of the characters was at a Buddhist temple. The monk said, “Think of your breath, and think of an ocean that is very still. You cannot plumb the depths of the waters until the waters are still.
I now had a visual, and a felt sense of the still ocean. It further contributed to this sense of relaxation of “just being with” Higher Power.
Then, about two weeks ago in Ignatian Contemplation, I felt Jesus inviting his first disciples to come, and I heard a baritone voice, a depth of resonance through sound. Another of the senses: deep sound that vibrates in the body. “Just Be with Me” + ocean stillness + vibrating sound.
Then, 1 week ago, again in Ignatian Contemplation, I was a fish, just under the surface, near the boat, when Jesus called to the fishers to follow him. I felt the stillness of the water and the boat, but I also got the sense of ego-less-ness. It didn’t matter if I was a fish or a human. Just BEING with Higher Power, the calm of just existing and not having even a human agenda.
Now, back to the Beatitudes to end:
I wrote a song a while back in response to Klotz’s Aramaic Beatitude words:
The translation of Tubwayhun, or “blessed” in Aramaic can say:
Aligned with the One
Healed
Healthy
Integrated
Renewed
Tuned to the Source
Happy
Resisting Corruption
I’ve taken these many translations of the Beatitudes and fashioned my own rendering in this song.
You can look at the book “Prayers of the Cosmos” to see more translations, remembering that in Aramaic/Hebrew there are many-layered meanings, all of them true! It is a combination of scholarship and heart/intuition to pick the ones that work for you now!
Healed are you who breathe with the Spirit;
The design of the universe is in your form.
And you deeply confused by life;
You shall return from your wandering.
And you who soften what is rigid within,
you shall get strength from the universe.
Aligned with the One are you who wait up at night,
weakened and dried out inside by the unnatural state of the world;
you shall be satisfied!
And Blessed are you who shine from the deepest place in your
bodies. You are rays of universal love.
Refrain:
Aligned with the One are You who radiate
and shine from a core of Love (4 Beats)
Blessed are you who sing the chord that unites;
you shall be rays of unity.
Healing to you shattered within / for trying to do what is right;
to you belongs the King- and Queendom.
Refrain
When you feel contaminated / and dislocated; When you feel an inner shame
for no good reason / It is the sign of the prophets to feel
the disunity around you intensely. (Pause 4 beats)
So, Do everything extreme, be like a white bird in the snow, for this is
the secret to your home in the Universe!
Refrain (2x)
End: for you shall see God everywhere!
Ameyn!