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WISDOM SAYING
John the Baptist spoke, "I must decrease, He must increase." So we live the same, if we intend to keep following Christ ~ and we have to keep living it at deeper and deeper levels. As we open our Heart to God, Who is Love, we are relinquishing our claimed right to fill head, heart, and life with what was there before, with what is convenient, with what makes us feel important, with what makes us popular with others, with what grants us the dulled comfort that is comfort for being closed off to the discomfort of truth, ... The more we relinquish, the more Grace arises. The more we surrender, the more our deepest longings are fulfilled, and out of the very emptiness that we feared so much. This fulfillment arises out of a profound space that we must enter and befriend as the Source of love, joy, and peace. There, we meet God within our deepest, truest longings for Love, and all Love offers. The peace we pursued, we come to find by decreasing, all the way to the point of our most inner, silent yearning. This is, oddly, the last place most of us seek God. This is, truly, the place we go when all other avenues ultimately fail us. But God is there waiting, waiting for us to decrease into the increase of all His Love offers.
*Brian K. Wilcox
MAIN COMMENTS
The English "space" comes from an Indo-European root. The root means "to flourish, succeed, expand." So the essential idea of space is positive.
We, however, often view and sense spaciousness as a negative, a threat. We feel it as a threat to our flourishing, succeeding, and expansion.
In considering space and its link to spiritual life, I give several questions and responses.
1) What is space?
"Space is freedom: freedom from confinement, from preoccupation, from oppression, from drivenness, and from all other interior and exterior forces that bind and restrict our spirits," writes Gerald G. May, in The Awakened Heart. Space is, May says, the "expanding emptiness in which consecration can happen, room for love to make its home in us."
Space is the fertile roominess in which Potential can arise and manifest. If roominess is crammed, Potential is suffocated and cannot manifest. The nature of God, or Potential, is to manifest, and in surprising ways; lack of spaciousness closes off the area for Potential to give of Itself and Its gifts.
2) What are the types of space?
May gives three types of space. Spaciousness of form. This includes the physical, geographical; examples are the sky, the openness in a cup before pouring coffee in it, and a place in your home without any thing put within it. Spaciousness of time includes pauses when we relax, just be. Spaciousness of soul is "inner emptiness, the room inside our hearts, the unfilled quality of our consciousness."
Obviously, the focus of this writing is the last: spaciousness of soul. Therefore below read with that in mind.
3) How do we flee space?
Simply, we flee space by filling it up. In meditation you might enter a quiet, open Silence. You enjoy it for a short time, then you get uncomfortable with it: after all, it seems too passive and lazy, not efficient and productive enough. So you start thinking about what you have to do later in the day. Or you start daydreaming some fantasy. Or spinning out a sacred visualization.
4) Why do we flee space?
There are different reasons we flee spaciousness. Among these are lack of understanding of the quality and role of emptiness in our spiritual journey; emptiness makes us uncomfortable and feels threatening; feeling emptiness of space is doing nothing, therefore, we are being lazy; attachment to prayer as words, not understanding that prayer is as much allowing our deeper longings to speak for themselves; our felt need to be in control, even of our prayer and communion of the Heart; fear that the spaciousness will overwhelm us; equating spirituality with what we do; lack of training in how to cooperate with space as a spiritual discipline; ...
I now share two other reasons that lead to our resisting inner emptiness.
First, is what May calls the myth of fulfillment. This is a selfish orientation to life. This says, "If I do not feel fulfilled, then something is wrong." Religiously, we might think things like, "What have I done to drive God away?," "What is wrong with me, for I do not feel the consolation I used to in meditation?," "Maybe my faith is not adequate?," "Why is God upset with me?," ...
Second, we, at times, fear to face up to the truth, so we anesthetize ourselves, silencing our longings, shutting down our feeling of vulnerability, and closing heart off to what we need to see about our situation and ourselves. We dull ourselves back into the routine of familiar perceptions. Writes May, "We would rather have the anesthetized serenity of dullness than the liberating dis-ease of truth." So emptiness means openness to the arising of new perspectives and repressed feelings, and we can welcome that or shut the door on it, after driving it out upon the first hint of its disturbing arrival.
5) How do we not flee space?
We befriend it. We accept it for what it is. Inner Emptiness is, often, discomforting. However we know within it is the only sure path to spiritual growth and enlightenment. Why? For that space is the inner area of vulnerability wherein Spirit arises in grace to meet my deepest longings; indeed, the Spirit is within my deepest longings. Also this Inner Emptiness is the process of my deepest Heart expressing its deepest longings to God and communing with the Divine at the center of my being. And this Inner Emptiness is the place my Heart is in communion with all beings. All this going on in the Inner Sanctuary of the Deepest Heart is not processed by my mind: I must know it by faith and receive it by grace.
CONCLUSION
One of the main ways we close down space is through religious and spiritual practice. By clinging to the way I believe, for example, I close off the Spirit teaching me new truth or new ways of seeing old truth. By refusing to be spacious to other persons who have experienced the Sacred differently than I have, I am shutting off God showing me how their experience might inform my experience. I am saying, by closing down on Inner Emptiness, which is, ironically, Inner Openness and Receptivity, "My comfort is more important than my seeing and living the Truth."
We cannot create faithful openness, this fertile emptiness. We cannot practice this by willfulness, for that itself will close down the openness. This emptiness, which is openness, comes as we yield ourselves to Grace, saying, "I am willing to receive, or, at least, I am willing to be led to be willing to receive." That willingness itself is the beginning of space as the openness for manifestation of All-Potential, for Love.
SUGGESTED REFLECTION
What spiritual practices can you engage daily to help in opening yourself to the grace that offers spaciousness to receive what God is longing for you to receive?
The above writing should clarify some why I contend the contemplative dimension of the Gospel and the Christian life is essential, not just for a few persons who are called to a contemplative life. How can I meet in love the vulnerability of others, if I have not learned to be with my own vulnerability? How can I tell others to love themselves, if I do not love myself enough to be with my own deepest yearnings? How can I tell others to live with integrity, if I flee insight into my own deepest truths?
See next page for Invitation to writer's contemplative village, purpose of OneLife, data on ordering author's book and upcoming devotionals 2008, and material on citations.
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