“The quality of your transformed work, your striving, your sincerity, your generous heart in being willing to offer yourself this way is indeed food for the angels.” Cynthia Bourgeault

Divine Nature as Generosity

“You’re awake, but awake to what? You don’t know. You’re awake to something that you can’t describe and which is absolutely marvelous, with a totally generous heart, which manifests itself with increasing tenderness, sweetness, and intimacy. Remember spiritual taste? Remember spiritual fragrance from your old ascetical training? This is what [Thomas Keating] is describing. Objectless awareness is a mode in which one tastes the nature of God. Look at the words that he picks up. Totally generous, marvelous, sweetness, tenderness, intimacy.

“When you’re able to hold your attention, even for a nanosecond, in that configuration where it’s not instantly running to the next object, just a little bit of a taste of that, I would call that the electrical magnetic current of the Imaginal realm, the sense of God at a much more subtle level of presence.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Exploring Father Keating’s Cosmogonic Mysticism – A Teaching with Cynthia Bourgeault, 1:10:00.

Overcoming Our Blindness to Generosity

“The second pillar of Jesus’ teaching is kenosis, and is often seen but rarely recognized. The kenosis Jesus has in mind is not a stoic stance against a pitiless reality, but rather it is a direct gateway into a divine reality which can be immediately experienced as both compassionate and infinitely generous. Abundance surrounds and sustains us like the air we breathe. It is only our habitual self-protectiveness that prevents us from perceiving it. Thus, the real problem with any constrictive motion (taking, defending, hoarding, clinging), is that it makes us spiritually blind, unable to see the dance of divine generosity which is always flowing towards us.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, 3:08 disc3 track1.

“We’re going to look at the question of agape and eros, or, to put that, if any of you are not familiar with those terms, we’re going to look at direction in love. And a lot of people, almost in classic religious practice, have made this distinction that the thing that separates divine love from human love is direction. And human love goes up, filled with desire and craving. Divine love comes down, filled with pure giving. I’m going to try to say that this is not the most useful way of looking at love. That desire and generosity are bound up in both.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene Conscious Love, 0:00 disc3 track1.

Our Role as Transformers of Energy

“Our role, as most of the great teachings have talked about, is to perceive the divine mercy, the divine qualities, as they wish to come into form and enact them. In other words, things like generosity, peace, truth, forbearance, love. And to the extent then that we are biaxial listeners, or if you like to use automobile metaphors, we’re sort of the cross-link, we’re kind of the transmission, where we listen, we listen, we receive the power, the energy, the incantation, the potential of the divine realm, and then we enact them upon the horizontal wall. So that things like grace, truth, peace, can be made manifest, can be enfleshed on this planet. And so that the world can flow with generosity. And when we perform this function, everything seems to go along swimmingly.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene Conscious Love, 10:43 disc2 track5.

“Our job is not to build nests. That’s for the birds. But our job is to take the nests and make them into homes, places of hospitality. And our job is not to collect and hoard. That’s for the ants. Our job is to take possessions and turn them, transform them into generosity. And our job is not to take bread and wine and eat and drink ourselves to death, but to transform them into the living body of Christ, received and given on behalf of the world. In other words, there’s a transformational role that we’re given to play.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, Disc5 track1.

“We human beings are incredibly volatile, quick, alive performers. We can devolve in the direction of stone or evolve into this subtle presence in which our lives become food deliberately for the higher realms. And I talked about this generating Second Body as, you know, in terms of your own self-esteem. I coat my soul, I coat my inner being, I get to be here for a while. But that’s not the real heart of it. The real heart of it is that it’s already only the heart of a player, a cosmic player, that can be coated. Only one who has already found, in some sense, the generosity and the scale to think for the good of the entire collective, that can even begin, that will even be interested in this.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 1:25:00 14 – Thursday Morning Teaching.

Generosity as a Practice of Giving

“We receive from an incredible bounty, but we pay back and we really don’t pay back so much as paying ahead, paying it forward by the, by the quality of our transformed work, which we hand out to this planet and which we hand back up to the great chain of being. And, and believe it or not, the quality of your transformed work, your striving, your sincerity, your generous heart in being willing to offer yourself this way is indeed food for the angels. And never doubt it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 8:02 Final Teaching Day 5.

“We’re not here to take, we’re here to give. And all of you are included in that giving because the generosity of your heart brought you here.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 48:00 01-Sunday Teaching Evil II.

“Nothing has been said for a long time about accountability, about obligation. We don’t like that language, but when you put it in the heart, it has a whole different resonance to it. It has the resonance of the people who get up in the morning when they don’t have to and see that the coffee wants to be made, so that those who sleep later find a coffee pot. It comes in the spontaneous noticing of when something is missing and putting the piece in. Staying present with the tasks that need to be done, not out of a sense of, oh, now I’m going to get my brownie points, but because the whole will be happier when this is done.

“So it’s done out of the spirit of generosity and gift. And it’s these qualities that soften and change the planet. And I think this is what we’re at. We’re at the end of an era of entitlement, which has reached its nadir, I hope. And something is calling us back to a different sense of what it means to be a human being.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 54:59 013-Outside of Gurdjeffs Pessimism.

Generosity as Participation in Divine Creativity

“As we stand up, stand to our feet in the cosmos, and take on fully the idea that our life is a mystery, and that what we’re creating out of it, what its ultimate worth, is not the money in the bank, but the savor and quality of our life, which is God’s life, brought forth through the action of being willing always to, in some sense, sacrifice realization at the horizontal level for the participation in the divine creativity and transformation at another level. In other words, to jump into an exchange whose purpose is to make manifest the mercy, the fullness of God. And that we become really accountable, individually and collectively, for putting into the atmosphere those qualities, compassion, generosity, peace, forgiveness, hospitality, beauty.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, disc5 track13.

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Logion 108
Yeshua says…
Whoever drinks what flows from my mouth
will come to be as I am
and I also will come to be as they are,
so that what is hidden will become manifest.

Logion 95
Yeshua says…
If you have money, do not lend it at interest.
Give it instead
to someone from whom you cannot take it back.

Logion 70
Yeshua says…
When you give birth
to that which is within yourself,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you possess nothing within,
that absence will destroy you.

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Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.