Shifting Into Our Spirit?

Shift into your spirit.

I realize when I used this phrase, it might not make sense. So let me lay it out and I hope give you a handle on the concept.

Being filled with the Spirit, walking in the spirit, It is the spirit that gives life... it's spiritual life not soul life. Most of our spiritual work is going through the motions in the labyrinth of our soul. To have a spiritual life we must first shift into our spirit. We can do it in our body and bypass our soul altogether. ie breath prayer, meditation, etc. But it can also move from our soul into our spirit. It's a shift of consciousness.

Shifting into our spirit is when our awareness moves from our soul into our spirit. Not that we loose the awareness of our soul, but the center of our awareness shifts into the perspective of our spirit.

Sometimes it's called awakening, awakening awareness, mindfulness, even Being In The Zone.

It's an expansive awareness that allows us to see and experience life from a spiritual perspective.

My Brother Rick

I just found out my brother Eric Mills Holmes died, so I want to tell you a little bit about my brother Rick. 

Here's my family at Thanksgiving in 1952. I'm the little guy on the left with my mother. My brother Rick is the guy on the right in the flannel shirt.


Rick always had a larger than life presence. You can see it in his eyes even here. It didn't matter how he was dressed or who he was around, he took center stage.

Rick had a run in with his guidance counselor at Concord High School. She told him he wasn't smart enough to go to college, so he needed to get a good mill job.
When Rick entered Duke University, he had two letters of recommendation one signed by John F. Kennedy and the other by Richard M. Nixon. Rick played on the Duke Freshman Basketball team. He made the Dean's List. So that when Spring came around, he was asked to give his old high school guidance counselor a tour of the school. Oh yea, Rick was a Page for Congress during High School in 1958.

Our dad, the Rev John Julian Homes, died when Rick was in college, so he snuck me on campus for about a month. I lived, ate and argued philosophy at Duke when I was 13. (I had started studying Confucius when I was 12, so I had ideas.) Thank You Rick for such an opportunity!

Rick graduated from Duke and worked a year in Manhattan for Cannon Mills, handling the J.C. Penny accounts. Of course, Rick brought me up there. My first view of New York City was Harlem during the race riots. It was mind boggling. Loved the city. Did the Zoo, the Statue, the UN, the Empire, and even took in some Broadway plays. Rick lived on Central Park facing a famous old church. It was beautiful!

Rick had a keen mind for law, so he went to UNC and got his first law degree, then got his second one from Columbia. He taught contract law in schools all over the country, then moving overseas to  the University of Galway and the University of Dublin. Rick would be writing sometimes 5 books a year, culminating with the encyclopedia Holmes Appleman on Insurance Law and Practice.

So when China was just beginning to open up, the John D. Rockefeller Foundation sent Rick to China to represent the US in the field of law. He visited political prisoners in jail. While he was there, the face off at Tiananmen Square happened and they jetted him out of the country. He was just that kind of guy, my brother Rick.

When I graduated high school, Rick set me up to go to Outward Bound School in Maine. That was a heaven on earth survival school. The guy who taught mountain climbing was the 2nd man on Everest. Euel Gibbons did the plant study for the islands. The wooden sailing boats were a Dutch design. We actually got drawn out to sea in 30 foot waves and had the Coast Guard pull us into a safe harbor. It was Awesome! Thank You Rick!

There's a million stories. I remember the time of the last big Race March in Atlanta. Rick was out leading the front carrying a sign that read: We're All God's Children.

But Rick did everything big. He was a big drinker and it got the best of him. But through that, my cousin, Mick Yount and I had the privilege of introducing my brother to Jesus. And eventually, he made his way into AA, which worked.

From here, Rick rebuilt a new life, with his faith and a wonderful family, but that's a story for another time.

So my brother died yesterday, resting in the arms of Jesus. Finally at peace, finally whole, finally at home.

Oh, one thing I think is a bit humorous and it set him on the path of law: Rick failed the physical exam for becoming a CIA operative after Duke.

I'm gonna miss that big lug of a guy! My brother Rick.

Rick and Grayson Holmes

Be A Doubter!

In mystical matters, I'm a skeptic! I test everything. I especially doubt and test my own spiritual experiences. It's too easy to deceive ourselves into thinking more highly of our spiritual states and experiences than they really are. I also have seasoned spiritual advisors who help to keep me accountable. If something can't be examined, if it's a deep secret entrusted to few, or too holy, your discerner should be standing straight up and the warning bells going off.

Jesus always led from the bottom up. He never lorded it over anybody, even when he was revealing peoples hearts and motives. Jesus did all his miracles right where he found himself. Wide open accountability. So should all pastors, priests, spiritual masters, prophets, and leaders.

We serve from humility, the lowest up, bathing them with honor, not from the platform down. It took the foolish humility of St. Francis to restore humility back to the Catholic Church at a time they were dying from the inside out. It' not too light a statement to say that if is wasn't for St Francis, there would be no Roman Catholic Church today. We have such a Pope in Francis who's bringing back that same spirit of humility in such a time as this.

For me, it happens every time. I'll be walking in a mystical experience with God, sometimes it feels like I'm walking in an expansive state, timeless. That's when it hits me. Is this psychosomatic? Am I creating this? And God will say, or show me something profoundly simple that floors me.

You see, only God can answer our deepest doubts. Remember Job. Let me repeat it: Only God's presence will ever answer our deepest doubts.

It's not wrong to have doubts. In fact, it's part of the discerning process. It's how we learn to discern. We question. Our learning curve is to ask good questions.

Here's my story. I was burned slap out of 40 years of failure after failure in the church. I learned, but I couldn't go on, something had to change. I was leaving for good. That's when I felt God tell me to get back in touch with my mystic roots and go back into Buddhism as a Believer. That went over like a led balloon. So I fought with God over that one for 5 long years.

So I was back, and one day I was doing a meditation practice called Great Doubt. It's when you doubt everything. You doubt God. That there ever was a God. You doubt your beliefs. You doubt yourself. Your heart. Your motives. You doubt your doubts. And then, when there's nothing left. When you're about to disappear as a being. You step out in faith. It's likened to stepping off a hundred foot cliff or a fifty foot pole. An act of total surrender.

So I stepped out into this transcendental fog, like a mist swirling around me, deafening in expansive stillness. I was wide open not knowing what to expect. But I was there, wherever there is. I hadn't fallen into endless nothingness. Then I saw it. It was like smiling eyes breaking through the swirling clouds. There came Jesus, striding up to me with open arms and a hug of welcoming acceptance and love like I've never felt before. I had found my way back. Swallowed up in the mystery of God. I'm still there.

So I encourage you to doubt, and test and taste and see. God waits to be examined and found true. Such is true humility.

Our Daily Prayer

 Saint-Petersburg orthodox theological academy 

Our daily devotion is a time to tune our hearts to God's heart, so that we might resonate with the vibration of heaven.

Create your own devotional prayers and allow them to grow and morph as you do. As a Franciscan, I use the Daily Office as my springboard. Sometimes I begin with sitting prayer (mindfulness, contemplation) and sometimes with the prayers and readings then moving into contemplation.

The key is to shift into your spirit before you begin. 

The time spent and complexity isn't the important thing here. Coming into God's presence is. (As God is spirit, getting out of our soul-centered head into our spirit is huge. We are designed for our spirit to be front and center, while our fallen nature puts our soul front and center. Our heart or our breathing are the two best ways to center ourselves into our spirit.)

In our repetition or learning by heart, we tune our subconscious as well as our consciousness. We're hardwiring it in.  So, repeat the verses and prayers that awaken your heart. Rewrite them til they are yours. This is the form part that grows and changes with us. Substance is our communion with God, and that's eternal.

The spirituality of transformation is restoration

This brings restoration back into our lives. Restoration is the gaining back God's original intent. It's getting back what we lost at the Fall, wholeness, belonging and fellowship. But more than that, it's coming into the abiding, creative, abundant life of Jesus, as we co dwell and learn to live out of our spirit in Him.

Our restoration is the process of tuning our hearts with God's heart so that like a tuning fork, our lives resonate with the vibration and presence of God. We bear Christ.

Here's a form: Invitational - Prayer
                        Instructional - Confession
                        Meditation - Focus on what God's Quickening, Awakening within you. What is the                                                    touchstone of change and transformation in your life?
                        Contemplation - Stillness, Worship, Sitting as with an old friend, bathing in His                                                                Presence, resting in the arms of your Father - whole and complete.

Restoration is the process of removing each and every disconnect, one by one, by healing the flow of God in our hearts, our lives and our relationships. And all eternal change begins in the Presence of God.

Journeying In

Photo Credit: Bob Holmes

We all get a taste for spiritual life somewhere along the way that eventually ruins us for anything else. It could be the moment we're born again, filled with the Holy Spirit, or even that deep longing for something we can't quite put our finger on. Something like the burst of enlightenment.

Whatever it is, it takes us unawares and out of our comfort zone. Like a slow journey home to a place we've never been before. But we yearn for it and we know it's home.

So, instead of laying out a program to follow, here are some ideas and observations I hope you can use in your own personal journey and practice.

In and Out

Before we work out our spiritual life, we must enter the long sometimes strange, sometimes dangerous adventure within.

It's said of the disciples that they were recognized as being with Jesus.
Just as Moses gazed on God's back and emitted God's presence glowing, so too the disciples carried the fragrance of Jesus presence with and within them.

Our whole spiritual life is about Presence though we rarely see it, we may see it's effects.

Extroverts might see this journey as self-centered while introverts might see it as an escape, but the wholeness of being includes both extremes and transcends them.

Our wholeness of being includes our polar extremes and transcends them.

Here's Our Problem as The Church

"Before Abraham was even born, I am."

Jesus is always in the present, the eternal living present, no veils, no layers of tradition to wade through, no rites to invoke. Jesus is present, right here and now.

Within our church structures, traditions, and practices, we have generation after generation, layer upon layer of meaningful and God fought out tradition. All resting upon the living presence of Christ. They're like beautiful veils we go through in our religious practices to enter the presence of Christ.

The Journey In  

Our traditions focus us. But on what? To what end?

Spiritual traditions though designed to bring us into our spiritual life, tend to structure our outworking of wholeness more than its in working. 

All spiritual life is lived inside out not outside in.

But our traditions, forms, and practices are not what's at issue here, abundant life is.

Our preparation for life can be our greatest obstacle to actually living.

Center your heart into God and live what you experience in him. It's a growing living process, not a finished work. 

Always appreciate life's complexity but live in life's simplicity.

Brokenness complicates everything while wholeness always simplifies to what's life-giving.

New Every Morning

Photo Credit: Bob Holmes

Be willing to be a beginner, every single morning. ~ Meister Eckhart

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,

His tender mercies never come to an end

They are new every morning, new every morning

and great is your faithfulness O Lord

Great is your faithfulness 

Every time we step into the depths of the eternal, it's like the first time, every time. It doesn't age, get old or wear out. It's always fresh, new and restores us to wholeness.

It's like drinking life and light.

Such is the river that flows where the spirit is life.

The Right Church

I woke up this morning with a dream. A young girl was talking with me passionately seeking the right church. I told her it was a mistake looking for the perfect church because Jesus changes everybody uniquely, and every church is unique. She looked into my eyes with a slight smile and I woke-up.

The simplicity of the Gospel, receiving the seed life of Jesus Christ into our hearts, has the ability to change every person, every culture, in every age, uniquely revealing the Glory of God through every language, people and culture on earth.

As our gathering together as disciples of Jesus is called the Church, some have likened our gatherings to an organism rather than an organization. That's because it's alive with people, families, and cultures transformed by the grace and mercy of God, and structured by the truth, wisdom and the revelation of Jesus in our lives.

Selah: We are held together by the love of God that flows through our lives to each other and into the world. We are constrained by love, empowered and embolden by love. Jesus says, by this all man will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. In fact, Jesus says, "I'm giving you a new commandment, love one another. Just like I've loved you, love one another." This commandment is not an option. It's The non-negotiable. It's the proof. It's the outward expression of the inner reality of our belonging to Jesus. To love like Jesus loves us. He is our master and we are his disciples being trained to love just like he loved.

When we gather, the Church is like a living diamond, cut with endless facets of glory, glowing and pulsating from within.

Jesus used the illustration of wineskins. Animal skins that have the ability to expand with the fermentation of the grape juice transforming into wine. Jesus says new wineskins are for new wine because the old skins will burst with bubbling up of new life. Hinting at tradition, Jesus says people always say the old wine is best. So learn from tradition but don't be bound to it. Follow Jesus.

Restoration is what's in store for the Church. That's what you bring. You bear the life of Jesus Christ in your mortal body. It's why your body is called a temple of the Holy Spirit. If you dare grasp it, you bear the transformation of God to everything around you. You are the light of the world, the salt of the earth. Wake up to who you really are in Jesus our Lord.

God Is With You

For with you is the fountain of life, and in your light we see light. 

God is everywhere, omnipresent. And God is everywhere always. As God is eternal, all time and all eternity take their forms, physically and spiritually from God. God dwells in the eternal present. God is always present to you and to me, always.

Quietness and stillness bring us with awakened awareness to a still point, where we see with the eyes of our spirit, the entry into the eternal presence of God all around us...everywhere.

It's as splintered light, the glory of God breaking through.

Only as we take the time to be, can we truly become.

Take time captive to eternity, and be with God today.

And as you are being, learn to practice the presence of God in your common everyday world.


Foot Notes: Analytically speaking, this preludes our experiential understanding that our entry is in Jesus, as we are born of God, in him and he in us. There is an awaken awareness of our spirit, a cosmic conscienceness which is open to all of us as human Beings. Glory is there. This would be the second heaven, spiritually speaking. But here we're speaking of coming into the living presence of the One who created the cosmos: physically, mentally and spiritually, Our Father.

Humble Your Selves

Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and he will lift you up.

The operative word here is 'sight', or 'presence'. We need to be in God's presence first, otherwise it's an exercise of self...a religious exercise for those around us we can be proud of. Like Charles Dickens character Uriah Heep, we can be "so humble," in our spiritual pride. It makes us look good.

God's presence reveals everything as it truly is. Pretense and posturing are highly overrated. They're empty of substance and life.

Humbling our Selves in the presence of God is an outer action of an inner reality, a humble heart.

The humble hearted serve without a thought of them Selves.

Hear it again: The humble hearted never take a thought of themselves. Their focus is on the One they serve.

This is a What If  quote.

Blessed are the humble for they will inherit the earth.

God knows he can trust the humble. 

But What If

We live in a success-driven culture and we the church mirror the corporate model with our prosperity gospel, with our emphasis on money, success and power, being a celebrity Christian for God. But what if...What if this is not God's doing but ours.

We all have huge hurts, pain and devastation in our lives. What If we don't try to get rid of it all, but see our point of need as a lightening rod to ignite our lives.

Our mess becomes our message and a revelation of God's grace.

God is prepared to use the place of our deepest need as the point of our restoration to the whole world. Click to Tweet

It's time to turn it upside down.

But God has chosen the foolish things in this world to shame the wise; God has chosen the weak things in this world to shame the strong. God has chosen the lowly things in this world and the despised things--and the things that are not--to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. But by his doing, you are in Christ Jesus who has become for us the wisdom of God in us, our righteousness, holiness, and redemption, so that as Scripture says, "If you want to boast, boast in God alone."

God's Glory

And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

The glory of God is an ever-expanding revelation that shocks and stuns us with awe and worship. We experience God more than we apprehend Him. We never expect it, and like the sunlight that glints on the leaves of a tree, we can't look directly at it. God's glory reveals everything.

Think of Jesus on the mount of Transfiguration. Think of Moses who saw the back of God and had to wear a veil the rest of his life because the glory from his face terrified everybody around him. It revealed them. Nothing is hidden from the glory of God. Everything is laid bare...all our secrets, every private thought.

Abiding, Cultivating and Living A Whole-Hearted Life

       Our spirit is the gateway to God and to the eternal.

As Jesus is The Way, The Truth, and The Life, our spirit is the door we open to Jesus.

We nourish our soul from our spirit. 

Our soul is broken so it doesn't retain life well.

That's the reason we are admonished to 'abide in the vine.'

Abiding is not a religious exercise mind you,

it's the exercise of life within us.

Spiritual life flows, it bubbles up like a spring in our heart

and nourishes our soul.

Everything integrates in our heart

both good and evil integrates into our lives through our heart.

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.

Our heart is where we cultivate what we experience with God in our spirit.

It is where we work out what we focus on.

Our heart is like a garden where we cultivate the seeds God has planted within us.

These seeds are not mere thought or mental acquisitions we can control or manipulate with our mind.

They are life itself, tasted and experienced.

Before these seeds become thoughts or feelings they are spirit.

Until we see behind the words we speak,

Until we see the breath, the spirit that Jesus spoke with,

We will be locked withing a world or our own and other people's design.

The Spirit alone gives eternal life. Human effort accomplishes nothing. And the very words I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

We live, as C.S. Lewis said, in the Shadowlands.

The spirit is behind the shadows we see,

The eternal as through a veil.

So what's behind the words we speak? 

What spirit, what motivates us? 

Is it love? Is it our spirit? or is it our soul that moves us to speak, control and shape? 

And what fills the content of our words? 

For our words are vessels of substance or shadows, spirit or soul.

And where do we dwell? Where do we live?

We are urged by Scripture to dwell in Christ.

Since you have been raised with Christ seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 

As we speak, live and give the atmosphere of our presence from where we dwell, 

We have a mandate to seek and dwell with Jesus.

A whole-hearted life