Greetings,
Friends.
I want to share a reflection on the theme of being held in tenderness beneath the surface turmoil of our minds.
I'm going to begin this with reading two quotes,
The first from a well-known Christian contemplative writer,
Thomas Merton.
If you descend into the depth of your own spirit and arrive somewhere near the centre of what you are,
You are confronted with the inescapable truth that at the very roots of your existence you are in constant and immediate and inescapable contact with the infinite power of God.
And James Finlay wrote,
In utter simplicity,
We intuitively realise within ourselves that our existence,
Though truly our own,
Is to the one who is as the waves are to the sea,
As the light is to the flame.
Our prayer becomes our basking in this light,
Our being quietly warmed by it,
Our being consumed by it.
Our prayer becomes our silent sinking in the sea of being that is at once God and ourselves.
I'll read that last line of his again.
Our prayer becomes our silent sinking in the sea of being that is at once God and ourselves.
I want to build on this metaphor of our prayer as a silent sinking in the sea of being.
This image may not be new to you,
But it's one that we need regular reminding of.
I find it particularly helpful personally as it gives a kind of bodily feel for quiet prayer.
In this metaphor,
Our mind and its preoccupations are the ruffled surface of a deep lake or ocean.
We get so caught up at the surface level that it appears to us as reality itself.
And like Peter in that story,
We cry out to Jesus to save us from the waves that threaten to drown us.
But just below this troubled surface with all its stories of doom and terror,
There is the quiet expanse of being,
Of the oceanic tenderness that is God.
We spend so much of our time listening to the versions that our mind is spinning,
Allowing the surface waves to convince us that this is who we are and this is how life is.
That our whole sense of life can become destabilized and this can feel like a real threat to our nervous systems.
And in this way of understanding our being,
If this is our only level that we operate on,
It's no wonder that so many people are struggling with depression,
Anxiety and profound despair.
There's an acronym for the times that we're living in increasingly,
So it's called VUCA,
Meaning volatility,
Uncertainty,
Complexity and ambiguity.
But the contemplative path teaches us that by shifting our awareness to the silence just beneath the surface and by resting deeply in the tenderness of being that we find there in Yahweh,
The I am present one,
We discover who we are as held in tenderness,
One with being.
It can take some time and attuning,
But this ultimately releases us from the heavy oppression of the surface dramas that we allow to dictate our reactions,
The narratives that our minds weave,
Where we are convinced that we have to hold ourselves in being.
Our minds have such a wonderful ability to project and make meaning and this has allowed us to more than survive as a human species.
But one of the unfortunate results of this extraordinary capacity is that we build up a sense of self as separate from life.
Alone,
Don Quixote is tilting at windmills.
And with time,
This becomes quite solidified in our minds.
It's kind of like a salt sculpture of a self that we have crystallized out of the shards of our perceptions,
Conditioning and interpretations.
And we're so convinced of the sense of ourselves that there's an existential dread when it feels threatened.
Yet I've been finding that although the process invariably involves suffering and devastation,
It's the most freeing thing to see through the self-constructed self and our attempts to keep ourselves stable and safe and to let go into life,
Entrusting ourselves into the tender holding of our being in God's being.
This is why detachment is such a strongly recurring theme in contemplative spirituality.
It's not a cold,
Indifferent detachment.
Rather,
It's a letting go of all that holds us in the terror of trying to ensure our own security and well-being and gently surrendering,
Falling,
Submerging and ultimately dissolving into the tender holding of the everlasting arms.
In this process,
We become anything but cold indifference.
We become tenderness itself,
One with,
Dissolved into the tenderness of God's being.
And in this way,
As James Finlay said,
Our prayer becomes our silent sinking in the sea of being that is at once God and ourselves.
