1. The loss of Integral Christian Spirituality. “The earliest known use of the Latin word spiritualitas remains very close to what St. Paul meant by ‘spiritual’ (pneumatikos): Christians, by virtue of their baptism, are meant to be ‘spiritual’ in the sense that they are meant to be ‘led by the Spirit’ and to ‘live by the Spirit’…. In the thirteenth century it…already was beginning to be divorced from the Christian life as a whole. By the end of the middle ages it was often regarded as a special way of being a Christian, or a special interest which some Christians might have, but which was not applicable to the general run of believers. Some Christians are ‘spiritual’, others are not, and the criterion is not fidelity to the gospel, but a particular intensity of ‘interiority’, or something of the kind.” (Simon Tugwell)

2. Re-opening to the whole. “What I feel people are looking for today in different ways is an awakening to that need for wholeness---body, soul, and spirit. Body is the physical organism and part of the physical universe---the electromagnetic energy that is flowing through everything and flowing through our bodies. And then there is the soul, the psyche---that is not only the mind or even the will, but the whole heart and feelings and senses, the whole psychological being. That is also part of your human being. Beyond the physical and psychological is what in English we call the spirit; in Sanskrit we call it the Atman, the inner self. Beyond the body, beyond the mind and the psyche, is this transcendent spirit that is present everywhere in everybody here and now. The spirit is among us and we’re trying to realize it. We don’t neglect our bodies, we realize their sacredness. And we don’t deny our human contacts; human relations are sacred also. But they become sacred only when we transcend our body and our soul and open to the Holy Spirit, the transcendent mystery, the Divine, the Word, the Tao, the Brahman.” (Bede Griffiths)

3. Recognize that the “individual” is a many-leveled abstraction from the whole and don’t treat it as a given, simple, and independent reality. We are more connected with the whole than separate from it: To treat the separateness as absolute rather than contextual and relative is to introduce another of those illusory divisions into reality.

4. Each person is the interdependent whole from a different perspective. Respect this infinite depth and this element of unknowability in each person.

5. In one perspective, there’s nothing to do, for there are no problems; in another perspective, there’s everything to do for love of God and creation.

6. My sending (missio) as a Benedictine oblate invites me to embody a form of spirituality that is contemplative, integral, a school of humility, respectful of material things in their use and their beauty, and hospitable to all of creation.

7. In what from our ordinary perspective is a paradox, Benedict takes over the already conventional “ladder” of growth and reframes it as a Ladder of Humility (Rule, chap. 7): “We descend by exaltation and ascend by humility.” It is odd to find this congruous statement forged in the language of empirical psychology: “The whole course of human development can be viewed as a continuing decline in egocentrism. (Howard Gardner)”

8. Zen’s tenth ox-herding picture and its verse express one aspect of Benedictine spirituality: “Entering the marketplace barefoot and unadorned. Blissfully smiling though covered with dust and ragged of clothes. Using no supernatural power, you bring the withered trees spontaneously into bloom.” Spiritual nakedness. Humility. Generativity. Joy. To be sure, God’s power is here for Benedict; but not as ours to command.

9. My meta-purpose always reveals itself as sophianic love, the combination of wisdom and love, where love is primary and is informed by wisdom of all kinds, from the spiritual to prudence to the street-smart. That’s my natural purpose, the path that I spontaneously choose and am chosen by, what I could not not-choose without becoming someone else, what makes me happiest.

10. At first glance “sophianic love” may seem a safe name for what God calls all of us to as Christians. But it is the baptism only of a particular, inward temperament: Another temperament is disposed to the holiness rooted in courage in the world and active concern for justice.

11. The flexible and numberless array of aims and forms embraces a flexible and numberless array of degrees and kinds of partial differentiated integrations. Every aspect of our finiteness and the variety of our aims prevent us from being wholly integral in our learning and teaching and existence. But it is important to keep in the background a measured sense of the whole integral field as we focus for a given time on a given part of it for a given aim.

12. Potentially differentiation and integration are infinite. Thus there is an infinite range of more and less integrated wholes. What is an integral whole in one focus is an integral part of a larger integral whole in another focus.

13. The complete articulate integral field arises for us out of the deeper field of contemplative unknowing and within the articulate integral field we are constantly shifting focus between relative wholes and parts. It may be decisive to be aware of and be able flexibly to shift this focus.

14. At a certain point we gain the ability to self-monitor, self-assess, and self-regulate as a regular thread of our consciousness This practice allows us to discern and critique an aspect of our identity by turning our attention back onto our present self as a sort of participant-observer of our own life. It is a key transition in our capacity for integral understanding, because the way we define our identity becomes visible as an element determining what we are free to think and do.