#Neil Douglas-Klotz

[eyeoftheheart]

“Using Jesus native Aramaic language allows us to connect directly to his feeling, to his atmosphere and to his sound. In the ancient mysticism of the Middle East, the easiest way to connect with the Spirit, or you could say the spirituality, of a prophet or of a saint or mystic was to breathe as they were breathing, to get into rhythm with them, to walk in their footsteps, or to intone sound as they were intoning it. And to feel one's breath connection, one's sound connection, with that prophet or with that mystic. Jesus teaches in the same way.”

~ “I Am” The Secret Teachings of the Aramaic Jesus by Neil Douglas-Klotz

[miltybc]

beyond ourselves

We are down to the next to last phrase of the Lord’s Prayer, which is the one about temptation and evil, so easy stuff to describe. Here’s what I had to say. _____________________ When you watch a series on television, whether on a network or one of the streaming services, the episode often begins with a recap—“Previously on . . . whatever the show is—and then it goes on to the new stuff. Even…

[proseandpsalms]

Does anyone have good book recommendations?

I've recently read The Hidden Gospel by Neil Douglas Klotz and The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr.

[somethingundermyskin]

"Deliver us from the guilt that clings to us, just as we release what others owe us”.

"Release the shackles of our mistakes, just as we release what binds us to the entanglements and guilt of others".

The Lord’s Prayer original translation out of Aramaic by Franz Xavier;Jans-Scheidegger translation to German by Neil Douglas Klotz, das Vaterunser p.60

[leonbloder]

Reading The Bible Critically

One of my seminary professors told us about a time when he guest-preached at a small, rural church as a favor for a friend.  

When he read the Scripture for his sermon, he used his Greek New Testament, which he translated directly from the original Greek. 

After the service, he was approached by several of the agitated church elders.  

"What version of the Bible were you reading from?" they angrily demanded.  "We only use the King James Version of the Bible in our church!" 

He patiently showed them his New Testament and explained that he translated it from the original language on the fly, but they were not mollified.  

One of them said, "If you ever preach here again, make sure you use the right interpretation."  

Of course, this begs the question, "What is the right interpretation of the Bible?"

I don't have the space in a Daily Devo to address that question entirely, but suffice it to say that whichever interpretation is closest to the ancient Hebrew and Greek languages from the original manuscripts is a safe bet. The problem with interpretations, in general, is that they are interpretations.  People are making editorial decisions about which variations in the ancient manuscripts (none of which are original, by the way) and codices that have been discovered to use as sources.  Then, there is the problem of Aramaic, which is the language that Jesus and his disciples would have spoken to each other.   For example, to better understand what Jesus may have said when he gave the disciples the Lord's Prayer, you would need to translate the Greek text into Aramaic and then back into English.   Biblical scholar Neil Douglas-Klotz did just that; see the result below.  The bold print is the traditional words, and the italicized are the words translated from Aramaic: 

As you can see, language matters.  The translation from Aramaic is full of nuances and an expanded understanding of the words that Jesus would have spoken to his disciples when they said to him, "Teach us to pray."  

So, why am I sharing all of this in a Devo?  

There are far too many Christians in our culture today who are fond of starting conversations about faith with the words, "The Bible says..."  Sadly, most of them never really read the Bible for all it's worth. 

If you want a translation of the Bible closest to the original Greek and Hebrew, get a copy of the New Revised Standard Bible.  There are editions of the NRSV that also have study guides. 

And if you want to read some great books on how to read the Bible critically, check out these: 

Peter Enns: "How The Bible Actually Works," and "The Bible Tells Me So"

Rob Bell: "What is the Bible?"

Rachel Held Evans: "Inspired" 

Various Authors: "The Bible And The Believer: How to Read The Bible Critically and Religiously" 

Marcus Borg: "Reading The Bible Again For the First Time" 

If you want a conversation partner in your journey or have questions about where to find more resources, feel free to contact me.  

May you discover more about the Bible than you ever knew, and may the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you now and always. Amen.  

[bookkats]

Maundy Thursday: Lord Teach Me to Pray/Give Yourself Up to God

Maundy Thursday: Servant PrayerJohn 13:1-17Mark 10:13-15 Breath Prayer Inhale: Lord teach me to serveExhale: Amen, Amen Ritual Washing of Hands/Feet Celebrate Communion  Pray the Lord’s Prayer: Have Different People read different versions before you read it together  Lord’s Prayer, from the original Aramaic Translation by Neil Douglas-Klotz in Prayers of the CosmosO Birther! Father- Mother…

[bodyalive]

Picture showing connective tissues (fascia) between bundles of muscles.

* * * * *

"Previously we thought body movement was accomplished by a series of ratchets, levers, and pulleys. Lately, this machine model has begun to break down.Connective tissue is the ocean within us, and, in fact, contains the same basic proportions of elements, salts, and carbon compounds found in sea water...it becomes more fluid the more it is moved; the more sedentary, the more 'dried out' it becomes. We literally moisten ourselves and make more variations of movement and action possible.The water within us seems to have a sort of mind...The new model sees the body water itself shaping us. That is, we do not contain it like a bottle; it holds itself together like 'standing waves' and shapes our more solid structures around it."

-Neil Douglas- Klotz

[Body Alive]

[bsahely]

Interesting quote from "Prayers of the Cosmos: Reflections on the Original Meaning of Jesus' Words"

Interesting quote from “Prayers of the Cosmos: Reflections on the Original Meaning of Jesus’ Words”

Hi – I’m reading “Prayers of the Cosmos: Reflections on the Original Meaning of Jesus’ Words” by Neil Douglas-Klotz, Matthew Fox and wanted to share this quote with you. Remembrance: The Birth of New Creation and Liberty Wela tahln l’nesyuna Ela patzan min bisha (KJV version: And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil) Don’t let surface things delude us, But free us from what…

[kinhagamer]

Pai Nosso em Aramaico e tradução

Pai Nosso em Aramaico e tradução

Pai Nosso em aramaico Abwun d’bwashmaya Nethqadash shmakh Teytey malkuthakh Nehwey tzevyanach aykana d’bwashmaya aph b’arha Hawvlan lachma d’sunqanan yaomana Washboqlan khaubayn (wakthayn) aykana daph khnan shbwoqan i’khayyabayn Wela tahlan I’nesyuna Eka patzan min Bisha Metol dilakhie malkutha wahayla wateshbukhta I’ahlam almin Amayn Possíveis traduções Ó Pai-Mãe do Cosmos, origem…

[khyatigautam]

Kahlil Gibran's Little Book of Love - Book Review

Kahlil Gibran’s Little Book of Love – Book Review

Author: Neil Douglas-Klotz

Paperback: 220 pages

Publisher: Amaryllis; an imprint of Manjul Publishing House (15 June 2019)

Language: English

Kahlil Gibran is a phenomenal writer of his times known for his simplistic yet profound writing. This Lebanese-American writer has been influenced by his middle eastern culture, nature mysticism, and spirituality. His words flow seamlessly exploring the…

[eyeoftheheart]

Prayers of the cosmos : meditations on the Aramaic words of Jesus by Neil Douglas-Klotz

“Native peoples in the Middle East also had a rich language, culture, and spirituality for thousands of years before Jesus. His inspired use of many older sacred phrases, reaching back even beyond the Hebrew tradition, shows that a native mystical tradition did survive, probably in hiding or in the desert, both before and throughout the rise of orthodox Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Some schools of Sufism claim to be among the inheritors of this native Middle Eastern tradition, which precedes even the Egyptian mystery schools.

(...)

The effect of the "mystical" is not to mystify, but to return us to a better relationship with the cosmos, which is the heritage of all native traditions.

(...)

All the major contemporary traditions of the Middle East — Jewish, Christian, and Islamic —stem from the same source, the same earth, and probably the same language. All originally called God either El or Al, which means "That," "the One," or "that One which expresses itself uniquely through all things." From this root arises the sacred names Elat (Old Canaanite), Elohim (Hebrew), Allaha (Aramaic), and Allah (Arabic). If this simple fact became better known, I believe there would be much more tolerance and understanding among those who consciously or unconsciously perpetuate prejudice between what are essentially brother-sister traditions.”

~ Dr. Neil Douglas-Klotz (Shaykh Saadi Shakur Chishti)

[nightkitchentarot]

The Lord’s Prayer from the Aramaic

THE LORD'S PRAYER

translated directly from the original Aramaic by Neil Douglas-Klotz in Prayers of the Cosmos: Reflections on the Original Meaning of Jesus's Words

O cosmic Birther of all radiance and vibration,

Soften the ground of our being and carve out a space within us where your Presence can abide.

Fill us with your creativity so that we may be empowered to bear the fruit of your mission.

Let each of our actions bear fruit in accordance with our desire. Endow us with the wisdom to produce and share what each being needs to grow and flourish.

Untie the tangled threads of destiny that bind us, as we release others from the entanglement of past mistakes.

Do not let us be seduced by that which would divert us from our true purpose, but illuminate the opportunities of the present moment.

For you are the ground and the fruitful vision, the birth, power, and fulfillment, as all is gathered and made whole once again.

And so it is!

[desertislandcloud]

Caulbearers are a Manchester-based collective of musicians, formed in 2007 and led by Damien Mahoney, with contributors hailing from around the UK and Europe. A DIY ethic has coursed through the band’s work, including releases, design, production and much of the recording process. This hybrid ensemble is known for blending diverse musical styles and fusing them together on stage, weaving nu-jazz and folk with elements of hip-hop, funk, dub, soul and afrobeat.

Written in 2017, the song’s lyrics for 'Burst Through The Borders' were inspired by timeless texts by authors such as Idries Shah, Kahlil Gibran and Neil Douglas-Klotz whilst simultaneously dreaming of a beautiful revolution occurring in the markets, pubs, boardrooms, hospitals and schools of our towns and cities.

“As a species, we have so many difficult challenges to find solutions for, that it can feel overwhelming to know where and how to start. I wanted to write something that had total faith in the possibility of change, in the ability to transcend the complexities of our modern lives with simplicity. The song imagines this energy of love flooding through the world and transforming the institutions and purposes of our societies and our lives. By its nature, it dismantles the barriers that cause hardship for so many and the borders that separate us from each other.  I wanted to write something that included everyone and everything. I was imagining this powerful force, reaching and filling up all these places and the people in them, leaving no one behind," says Damien Mahoney. https://caulbearers.bandcamp.com https://www.facebook.com/caulbearers https://twitter.com/Caulbearers https://www.instagram.com/caulbearers

[somethingundermyskin]

,,Let us not be seduced by the surface of life, nor be so introverted and self-absorbed that we can no longer act simply and humanly at the right time.

Save us from hoarding false wealth and from the shame of not giving help at the right time. Let not superficial things mislead us, but free us from what is holding us back.’’

After Neil Douglas-Klotz, The Lord's Prayer p.65; credits to the site ,,gottimalltag.de/glaubens-gedanken/aramaeisches-vatermutterunser/“; translated from Aramaic to German to English

[brendanelliswilliams]

Homily for Holy Thursday

What follows is the homily I delivered for the Holy Thursday Liturgy at Grace and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church (online, owing to the realities of the pandemic), on April 9th, 2020. During the present time of radical upheaval, my hope and prayer is that these words, and the worldview and invitation they represent, might inspire and support a few hearts and souls who are now seeking to find a fresh and more life giving way of walking on this sacred Earth.

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On Holy Thursday we usually speak, in one way or another, of the sustaining qualities of bread, of its symbolism translated into the Holy Eucharist, and to the ‘table of fellowship’ more broadly.

Yet on this occasion we have no sacramental bread to share. We do, however, have other forms of bread to sustain us. ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ Holy Wisdom invites us to ask—: ‘Grant us the sustenance we need.’ In the ancient Syriac version of the Lord’s Prayer, that line translates more literally as, ‘Grant us the bread we need, from day to day.’

I wonder what bread it is that we actually need. What forms of sustenance do we really require in this life—and in this particular historical moment? It might well be that what we need isn’t at all what we’ve long assumed we needed. And now might be the perfect time for us to realize and fully come to terms with that fact. What is it that truly feeds us—body, mind, heart, and soul? In other words: What’s actually fundamental to our humanness?

The other day my Bishop in California, Marc Andrus, reminded me of a commentary on the Lord’s Prayer written by the contemporary Sufi teacher, Neil Douglas-Klotz. In this commentary, he goes line by line with the prayer and beneath each phrase gives his own reflections or petitions in response to the original text. In response to the line, ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ he writes:

‘Grant what we need each day in bread and insight: subsistence for the call of growing life.…Let the measure of our need be earthiness: give all things simple, verdant, passionate….Animate the earth within us: we then feel the Wisdom underneath, supporting all. Generate through us the bread of life…grant what we need each day in bread and insight.’

This does a fair job, I think, of pointing—even if somewhat obliquely—to one of our chief sources of nourishment. A source to which our prodigal return is long overdue. That source is God’s manifest Creation: Nature, or, in our specific environment here and now, the Earth, from whom our very life comes forth, and from whom, as Neil Douglas-Klotz points out, comes also Wisdom: Wisdom incarnate, bodily, earthly: Christ the Word of Heaven and the Word of Earth.

‘That peace which the world cannot give, I give to you,’ says the Jesus of John’s Gospel, as he rapidly approaches the end of his incarnate life. ‘The world’ here of course means the world of human contrivance: the social and political world of human beings and our often misguided endeavors. As I hope all of us can see clearly from where we presently stand (if we couldn’t see it before), the world of human affairs, and the way in which this particular society has normatively conducted itself, are most definitely incapable of offering us any real peace—or any authentic meaning and purpose. They have separated and distracted us from who we really are, where we come from, and what it is that actually feeds us.

And now that this social construct is in many ways forced to a temporary halt, we have the opportunity to redress it: to help remediate the misguided way of life we’ve collectively created and perpetuated. Now we’re invited to consider what it would look like to co-create a different kind of world. Perhaps a world that looks more like God’s Kingdom. If we simply kill time till we can rush back to the old, established way of being, then we forfeit this sacred opportunity—this holy opportunity to deeply examine and to heal the toxicities and the injustices of the way of life we’ve too long taken for granted.

And there’s a small but significant analogue to all this in our own parochial setting. It’s of course normal that folks will have grief and nostalgia and other emotions related to being in the physical space of the church, to doing things in a certain way, as they’re used to—that’s all perfectly understandable, and we all feel it to one degree or another. And, at the same time, if all we do is linger there and bide our time till we can return to familiar routines, then what have we gained? What have we really learned from all this? How have we grown and how have we transformed? How have we then accepted the opportunity God has put before us to live into a deeper expression of Her Kingdom?

I say ‘opportunity’ here knowing full well that really engaging the challenge and potential of this time is not a given, and, if history and observation of the present are any indication, many, many people will not seize hold of this opportunity; instead, they’ll find new ways to distract themselves until they can get back to ‘normalcy’. The problem is that the normalcy we’ve had in this culture is by no reasonable standards healthy, just, or aligned in harmony with God’s Creation.

So what will we do about that? What will we who claim to be religious, who claim to follow Christ—who, by the way, has always borne witness against most of what we assume as normal and right, whether we want to acknowledge that fact or not—what will we do about this whole scenario? Will we fall back into old habits, old assumptions and old patterns of corrosive behavior, or will we finally do something fundamentally different to reshape our world for the betterment of all? That is the challenge and the invitation I humbly place before you in this week of sacred observance, here in this liminal time: this time of fear and uncertainty, yes, but also of opportunity—of sacred opportunity.

Collectively, the bread we need is not to be found in material concern. The bread we need is the bread of true communion, which begins in each of us, and is manifest as loving connection with the whole of Life, the whole of God’s Creation. And in our context as a parish community, the bread we ultimately have to share with the world that truly nourishes is not to be found in our building, in our customs, in our supposed worldview assumptions, which many don’t fully understand or accept anyway. The bread—the real nourishment we hold and have to share—is to be found in the depth and quality of our witness. In our Sacraments, yes, but even more fundamentally, in the depth of our love: for one another, and for the whole of Creation. And it’s to be found in the depth of the transformation we’ve each undergone as spiritual seekers. All the rest is ultimately window dressing.

So, I want to say to you tonight, dear friends, that the real measure of how adequately we meet this strange and challenging time—the true measure of how adequately we meet it, of whether or not we embrace the opportunity God provides in it—is how well and how fully we’re able to live now into a new and more life giving paradigm: one of true interconnection with the whole of Life, and one which privileges in our language, in our focus, and in our practice the authentic and dynamic values of Nature, which are the values of the Origin of Life.

How will you—and how will we, as the Church—bear deep and relevant witness to those values now? That, I believe, is the charge and the invitation God has placed on our hearts.

May the Holy Wisdom of our Creator—who comes not just from above, but equally from below: from the clay of which we, too, are made; from the living Earth beneath our feet—bless and sanctify us all in that endeavor of integrous action and discovery, and equip us for the difficult work of actually living into and co-creating Her Kingdom. Amen.