HOLY GROUND — free as the sky

One of the most sacred, breathtaking, and awe-inspiring “cathedral” moments happen every week for me outside the physical confines of “the cathedral” or church. At least once or twice a week, my wife and I facilitate group spiritual direction sessions over Zoom with people all over the world. These are some of our dear communities of faith, sharing life and doing life together, through deep listening and companioning. My body is at rest, slower in breathing, and my soul is at home, with myself and others as faithful and authentic companions of the pilgrim journey. I can sense my “seven” -ness (Enneagram) of monkey-mindedness, jumping from one tree to another, calming down as I do not want to miss out on God’s presence and promises. It is apt that during Zoom I am sitting without shoes for I know that I am standing on holy ground. Every time. . .

Beauty can be seen, felt, and shared when souls meet and connect. It is Christ in me seeing, meeting, and encountering the Christ in others. Thomas Merton, a great teacher of mine, says it better than anybody I know or read in his journal book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. If there was ever a “conversion” experience for Merton, this was it at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in the center of a shopping district (God is indeed full of surprises with a sense of humor because that would be the last place Merton would choose to go) in Louisville, Kentucky. In a spiritual gem of a three-page journal entry, the quote below can be found toward the end. (At some point, I would like to share my own reflection journal I wrote a few years ago based on Merton’s journal entry.)

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. (Italicized are his)

This pure diamond is what Richard Rohr calls “Immortal diamond.” At first, our God-breathed souls can be shy, timid, and struggles to express themselves. With patience and waiting, the soul starts blooming and peaking into the full display of divine imagination and enrapturement. The key here is the preservation of such a safe and sacred space with enough tentativeness of patience and waiting. This waiting opens, paves, and preserves the very space where God can be God in nudging and speaking ever so softly in tentative and unassumed language. Often, it is so “conjectural” and shy that it is hard to capture and notice such small and seemingly faint voices of God.

The small voices over time mount up and stand as faithful witness of God’s visitations. The small voices become conversational and as a matter-of-fact whispering language between deep friends or lovers. The whispers of God become thunderous and the gentle presence of God becomes supreme in our life. Looking back, the truth of the matter is that God has been whispering repeatedly and faithfully and yet never with judgment for all my life which speaks to the very nature of God, patiently waiting for us and standing at the door and knocking for us to open the door. Since we can only view and live our life from our life’s perspective, God does not ignore that reality. Instead, God as the Reality enters our reality. Merton earlier in the same journal entry, captures it this way, “I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.”

Immanuel and incarnation are inseparable. Christ keeps incarnating himself into our lives so we can have union with God through Christ. It is Christ in us that pursues after us by becoming like us and coming to us faithfully as our life that propels us toward union with God as Jesus pursued union with God. Life, then, is a doorway, being “birthed” by God, of meeting God and pursuing union with God. The process of being in union with God allows and gifts us toward union with everything God created.

Contrary to what we may think, what opens the way of experiencing God is often through our senses, not necessarily our thoughts. We do not think our way to heaven. We live our earth life to heaven. Parallelly, I resonate with Henri Nouwen, “You don’t think your way into a new kind of living but live your way into a new kind of thinking.” We do not think to live, rather we live to think. Our senses are what grounds us and are in touch with ourselves, NOW. Thus, paying attention and giving language to our experiences of our senses invariably opens the door to the realization of God’s presence. Then as we give language, tentatively and unassumingly, we organize and express our senses into thinking.

I “think” one of the reasons why our thinking cannot lead is because it is extremely hard to separate ego from our thinking as our thought is the favorite hiding place for our egos. Our thinking must come into submission of our experiential senses and be processed through community, both perennial and ancient as well as contemporary. Which is to say our thinking must be vetted and humbled over time. Thinking rightfully functions as a subservient servant rather than being a detached master from reality.

I find it ironic to use words to express the beauty and wonder when our souls know the truth, or the Truth as Person, so much more profoundly and mysteriously. . . At the same time, we, as a human race must continue to try to capture in words for us and for people in the next generations as saints and mystics, did in the past for us. The interplay between invitation and irony remains a constant struggle and elusive tension for me. . .