Articles, Stories, Poems, Meditations, Prayers and Books

Rev. 3/26/14

Summaries of Recently Published

by Charles Burack

Becoming an Interfaith Spiritual Director

This article describes my training to become a spiritual director—sometimes called a spiritual counselor, companion, or guide. I was trained at the Spiritual Directors’ Institute (SDI), which is run by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy. I discuss the evolving nature of spiritual direction, the ecumenical approach of the current SDI teachers, as well as the challenges of overcoming religious prejudice, choosing a spiritual director and supervisor from another faith, developing important skills such as contemplative listening, and growing a nondenominational, interfaith ministry.

Counsel for Interfaith Leaders and Peacemakers

This article offers guidance to interfaith leaders and peacemakers on how to cultivate a loving and inclusive spiritual life as well as facilitate deep conscious connections.

Creating Integral Prayers and Meditations

This article presents a selection of the interfaith, integral and nondenominational prayers and meditations that I created in order to facilitate shared spiritual experiences among individuals of diverse religious heritages and spiritual paths. I discuss the challenges of catalyzing transformative experiences among diverse individuals.

Cultivating Oneness

This article describes my efforts to overcome loneliness and alienation by experimenting with various prayers, blessings and meditations that cultivate a sense of oneness with myself, with other people, with nature, and with the Source of Life. I depict my experimentation with the central prayer in Judaism, known as the Shma: “Hear, O, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” Over time the prayer spontaneously transforms to include divine names from different religions and to address diverse religious communities. I also tell stories about the amazing and unexpected encounters that occurred as a result of these spiritual practices.

D. H. Lawrence’s Language of Sacred Experience: The Transfiguration of the Reader

This book examines the spiritual artistry of D. H. Lawrence, one of the most controversial figures in English literature and one of the greatest spiritual writers of the 20th century. While most scholars emphasize the psychological and political dimensions of his work, I focus on his prophetic and priestly ambitions. These sometimes grandiose ambitions impelled him to formulate an integrative psycho-spiritual approach grounded in the body and the cosmos. His holistic approach blended Western and Eastern spiritualities, particularly the mystical elements of Christianity and Judaism and the Tantric elements of Buddhism and Hinduism. In this book I demonstrate that his major novels are structured as sacred initiation rites that seek to evoke new and numinous responses to self, others and world. Lawrence hoped that his novels would have a transformative power that rivaled the power of the Bible!

Embracing the Many Names of the One

This article describes my Jewish mystical practice of each New Year praying for a new divine name that will at the center of my prayers and meditations. As my interfaith encounters deepen and my integral practice expands, I begin to receive divine names from other spiritual traditions, including Islam and Hinduism. Some of these names are masculine, others are feminine, and many are beyond gender. I reflect on how my reverential use of diverse divine names has transformed my life, including my relationship to and understanding of the Source of Life.

Facing the Challenges of Integral Spirituality

This article discusses the challenges the practitioners of integral spirituality face, such as superficiality, selfishness, confusion, elitism and misappropriation of spiritual practices. I offer ideas and approaches for meeting these challenges, including various ways to cultivate spiritual discernment (such as self-scrutiny, meditation, spiritual direction, spiritual companioning).

Forgiveness

This prayer asks for forgiveness from the various individuals in our lives who have knowingly or unknowingly hurt us. It also asks for self-forgiveness for the times we have not honored our own gifts, passions, visions, values and callings.

Healing Spirit: How Three Faith Converged to Heal My Body and Spirit

In this story I portray how a powerful Sufi (Islamic mystic) healer not only helped cure my pneumonia but miraculously transfigured my heart. The prayerful healing ceremony gifted me (born Jewish) with a terrifying and wondrous vision of Allah tearing open my chest and flooding my heart with love as well as a life-changing vision of Jesus on the Cross.

Healing Spirit of Rumi

This story portrays a spiritual excursion that my wife and I took to Jelaluddin Rumi’s tomb in Konya, Turkey, where thousands of devotee daily gather from around the world. Rumi is considered one of the greatest mystics and poets that ever lived. Though raised as an Islamic Sufi, he had an inclusive and universal spiritual outlook and founded a school of wisdom open to all. He also inspired the whirling dervishes. Amazing synchronicities occur on the way to his tomb and once we arrive.

Healer of Little Tibet

This story portrays a treacherous and beautiful trek that I took with my soon-to-be wife through the Himalayan Mountains in northern India as well as a dramatic spiritual healing I received from a famous Tibetan shaman (lhamo) living in the high mountain region of Ladakh. The shaman also does a divination about our forthcoming marriage. The shorter, published version of this story is entitled “A Visit to the Lhamo.”

I Am

This mystical poem conveys the awesome omnipresence of the divine. The “I” in the poem is the One that creates and is present in everything that exists and that also transcends existence. I used the poem in my mystic meditation entitled “Oneness.”

Inner Universe

This poetic meditation encourages the meditator to experience the links between her or his living body and the forces of the natural world. Each of us is a microcosm of the universe.

Kabbalah for All Peoples

This article describes how Christians, Buddhists and Muslims have responded to my experiential classes on essential Jewish mystical teachings and practices. Kabbalah is the heart of Jewish mysticism and has influenced and been influenced by both Christian and Islamic mysticism. I portray how Kabbalah enriched the spiritual lives of many of these individuals and sometimes offered them new insights into their own religious traditions. Some of my students experience astonishing transformations and synchronicities.

Meeting the Challenges of Interfaith Direction

This article describes some of the major challenges faced by spiritual directors and counselors who work with individuals of diverse religious and spiritual orientations. I offers guidance on how to be an effective interfaith spiritual director by learning from the world’s spiritual traditions, entering the client’s spiritual world, refraining from imposes one’s spiritual beliefs and values, finding a common spiritual language, discerning when to share a spiritual teaching or practice, and loving one’s clients.

Oneness

This poetic, mystical meditation encourages the meditator to identify with the One that creates and is present in everything that exists and that also transcends existence. The meditation is based on my poem entitled “I Am.”

Overcoming the Fear of Mixing Faiths

This article explores why interfaith and integral paths are often opposed by more traditional religious practitioners and communities. I honor religious differences, acknowledge legitimate fears and concerns, distinguish between interfaith and integral practitioners, challenge the legitimacy of certain criticisms, advocate letting go of spiritual possessiveness, question traditional assumptions about religious purity and exclusivity, emphasize fundamental human interconnectedness, and assert that spiritual wisdom and practices are divine gifts meant to be shared with all of humanity.

Reclaiming Jesus: A Jewish Ecumenical Perspective

This article discusses my early fears of anti-Semitism and consequent prejudices against Christians and Christianity as well as my subsequent efforts to understand the nature of Christian doctrine and practice and overcome my fears and prejudices. I describe my Gospel study with Pentecostal friends as well as my training as an interfaith spiritual director with the Catholic Sisters of Mercy. I also portray my visions and auditions of the spirit of Jesus, my academic encounters with the historical Jesus, and my new and evolving relationship with Jesus as a radical rabbi and spiritual revolutionary.

Responding to the Challenges of a Contemplative Curriculum

This article describes the use of contemplative practices in John F. Kennedy’s undergraduate psychology program. Drawing on my teaching experiences and on those of three other faculty members, I discuss the multiple educational purposes that contemplative pedagogies serve as well as the various strategies employed to introduce and integrate these transformational pedagogies into the classroom. I also discuss ways to maintain students’ psychological safety, ensure instructors’ contemplative competence, and maintain the separation of church and state.

Returning Meditation to Education

This article decries the forms of separation, alienation, conflict and suffering that are produced by today’s educational system. This system is wedded to worldviews and pedagogies that develop the mind but fail to value and cultivate the heart, body and spirit. I offer detailed descriptions of how various meditations, contemplations and visualizations can be effectively used in both private and public schools to provide a more holistic education. Contemplative pedagogies can refine perception and feeling, cultivate imagination, empathy and intuition, expand analysis and synthesis, and deepen learning, understanding and application. They not only promote self-awareness, self-empowerment and self-transcendence but also catalyze healing, well-being, creativity and growth. Moreover, they cultivate compassion, enrich interpersonal encounters and encourage social and ecological justice.

Sixth Senses of Interfaith Spirituality

This article examines the multiple meanings of “interfaith” and discusses a spectrum of interfaith approaches of an increasingly integrative nature: from interfaith dialogue at one end to integral spirituality at the other end, as well as the various multifaith, nondenominational and universal paths in between. I describe the blessings and challenges faced by practitioners of each of these six forms.

Songs to My Beloved

This book contains the poems that I wrote to the spirit of his beloved in 2001. It was my hope and prayer that these letter-poems would somehow draw my soul mate into my life. The poems chronicle my yearnings, visions, frustrations, despair and ultimate faith that his my loved would somehow hear the communications of my heart and find her way to me. In less than six months, she miraculously appeared in my life. In the Afterword, Mary Ann Konarzewski shares her experience of our meeting. Two years later, we couple married in a rose garden near San Francisco.

Speaking Silence: Poetry, Mysticism and Meditation

Written in poetic prose, this article portrays the various ways that mystics around the world use poetic language to describe their indescribable spiritual experiences. Their inspired words are able to convey the silent, sacred mystery at the center of existence. I demonstrate how various poetic figures (metaphors, similes, symbols) and rhythms (created by meter, rhyme and other forms of sound play) can transport readers and listeners to another realm and evoke in them powerful spiritual responses. I also present methods that mystic poets use to quiet readers’ ordinary consciousness (the distracted, busy, buzzing mind) so that they can directly experience the silent mystery of life.

A Visit to the Lhamo

The shorter, published version of the essay “The Healer of Little Tibet.”

Wrestling with Prayer

This article describes my lifelong struggles to find an authentic, meaningful and compelling way to contact, communicate with, understand and respond to the Source of Life. I portray my evolving views of divinity—from traditional religious belief to agnosticism to atheism to interfaith and integral mysticism. I discuss the strengths and limitations of both of verbal and silent prayer, as well as the relations between prayer and meditation. Throughout, I reflect on the challenge of bringing prayer into daily life, and of bringing daily life into prayer.