EXPLORATION AND STILLNESS

In case you are following our travels: In a few days (on March 31), we will be ending our time in Malaysia (and Southeast Asia) and land in Korea. For the first two months and a half, we will be in Yangpyeong at the same place where we stayed twice before. We look forward to ending our “itinerant” lifestyle and settling down to create a hospitable space to welcome people.

Stillness is vital to the world of the soul. If as you age you become more still, you will discover that stillness can be a great companion. The fragments of your life will have time to unify, and the places where your soul-shelter is wounded or broken will have time to knit and heal. You will be able to return to yourself. In this stillness, you will engage your soul. Many people miss out on themselves completely as they journey through life. They know others, they know places, they know skills, they know their work, but tragically, they do not know themselves at all. Aging can be a lovely time of ripening when you actually meet yourself, indeed maybe for the first time. There are beautiful lines from T. S. Eliot that say:

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

 John O'Donohue, Anam Cara (italicized mine)

The above words by John O’Donohue showed up in my recent social media feed. It was not the first time reading it, but I have a few more years under my belt to reflect on when I first encountered it. When I first read O’Donohue’s book, Anam Cara, years ago, it was as if I had found a “soul friend” (that’s what Anam Cara means in Irish) in him. Faced with suffering and “dark night of the soul” times, he accentuated taking a long loving look at what is real to another level of depth and perception. Thus, making the real more real and accessible to fellow pilgrims such as I. As I began reading his other works, I regretted his untimely death as he was only a few years older than me. 

The goal of my life, and for all humanity, is union with God through Christ. Union with God necessitates an up-and-down lifelong endeavor, patience, and courage. Though no one can say that one has achieved the perfect union during one's lifetime, one can experience intermittent union with God as a luring foretaste of what is ultimately to come. To use a biblical expression, the utter complete union with God is what we are saved for, circling all the way back to how God created mankind to be. 

Then, what are we saved from? We are saved from being in dis-union or separation with God. From the hopeless and unaware dis-union-ness with God, we awake from the illusion as separated individuals from God to an awakened realization that we are not rejected and forgotten orphans but God’s beloved children. We awake from a realization that we do not belong to anything or to somethings that replaced God to willing submission and belonging to God and God’s original and creative design. The initial submission is the first sign that we have taken the step toward being saved. We are then saved from the illusion of an orphan spirit to awareness of belonging as God’s children. 

The God language—from being in dis-union to union with God—can be vague and ethereal and simply has too much room for all kinds of unhelpful interpretations and wild fillers. How do you bring the language down to earth, to our lives? One way to touch the ground is to replace God with ourselves. In other words, we are saved from being in dis-union, compartmentalized, broken, and with multi-layered shadows with ourselves to being in union, integrated, whole, healed, with ourselves. 

This is where O’Donohue’s words are authoritatively inviting and promising, “You will be able to return to yourself.” In O’Donohue’s mind, stillness is a non-negotiable discipline especially as we age to be able to return to ourselves, explaining the phrase “able to,”—to our original selves, what God meant, before the sin and ego entered. 

One can never achieve the union with God without the union with oneself. We are saved from ourselves to being ourselves, from made-up to original, from our false selves to true selves, if you will. The quest of our life then centers around discerning how we came into dis-union with ourselves and how dis-union displays itself through our lives. Honesty and vulnerability to ourselves are added requirements as we cannot sleepwalk through this process. “Believing,” as in cognitive assent to “right doctrines,” cannot save us, while ignoring the existential struggle of being our true original selves, contrary to what we have been programmed to think.

The notion and process of our salvation, from to to, extend beyond ourselves, though it is the essential and practical starting point. Otherness has to come into our view as we pursue being in union with ourselves and God. And it will and it must. The enlarging circle and impact of the union do not end with us, but with God’s entire creation—the world God so loved to send God’s son, Jesus—others and otherness, others as in other people and peoples, otherness as in everything that was created by God. Here, we begin to understand God’s magnanimous purpose of drawing everything back to God, including us and especially us. Reconciliation is the word Apostle Paul used repeatedly. We can only live our lives, which is one reason why we must own and steward our lives. At the same time, we keep our eyes open and see the bigger reality of what God is doing and what God can do through people who are committed to the union journey.

Both O’Donohue and T.S. Eliot use the language that is intuitively familiar to our soul, “return” and “arrive where we started” evoke the sense of homecoming, a hero or heroine’s coming home to ourselves. So, we ultimately will return after years and often a lifetime of “exploring,” and with the divine help of “stillness,” we can finally come home. 

Even as I am currently far from my physical home, I feel closer to coming home. Not to harp too much on turning 60 this year, but I am at a crossroads of having done tons of exploring in my life and being in stillness. I do not think my exploring is done but it is slowing down for sure. There has definitely been more stillness that allows me to face and meet myself, in celebration and shame, in guilt and victory, and in brokenness and wholeness, all with honesty and grace, with smile and tears. It is out of this stillness that I think I can help others to become still and learn from my fumbling and explorations as well as theirs.

That is decisively my latest and perhaps my last exploration.