SAFE SPACE AND LONGING

"What do you want?” Jesus of Nazareth

“Longing is the heart’s treasury.” Augustine

Safe space allows us to take risks so we can discover our soul’s longings. Safe space also curates the collection of gifts of those longings and further develops the gifts so others can benefit from them, ever enlarging the impact. To me, this is one application of God’s Kingdom coming on this earth, through actualizing our longings.

Before we dive deeper into safe space and its relationship with longings, let’s consider our soul’s individual pursuit of our longings.

I start out with Gerald May from his book, The Awakened Heart.

There is a desire within each of us, in the deep center of ourselves that we call our heart. We were born with it, it is never completely satisfied, and it never dies. We are often unaware of it, but it is always awake. . . Our true identity, our reason for being, is to be found in this desire.

When the desire is too much to bear, we often bury it beneath frenzied thoughts and activities or escape it by dulling our immediate consciousness of living. It is possible to run away from the desire for years, even decades, at a time, but we cannot eradicate it entirely. It keeps touching us in little glimpses and hints in our dreams, our hopes, our unguarded moments. (italicized are mine)

Listen also to the Passion translation of Proverbs 4:23, “So above all, guard the affections of your heart, for they affect all that you are. Pay attention to the welfare of your innermost being, for from there flows the wellspring of life.”

The subtle nuanced chasm of our hearts being always awake yet often being unaware of it is what separates the aware souls from unaware souls. Being awake to our hearts is identical to the very pursuit of God who intimately created each of us. In other words, pursuing awakened hearts and pursuing God is one united journey.  During my one-year-long sabbatical which ended late last year, I sense that this was ultimately what I was processing. Somewhere during the sabbatical, it dawned on me that no one can or should steward my life and my innermost being. I am the steward of my heart, affection, and desire.

Bible tells us that God is always with us. We are assured that God is near. Jesus and the Holy Spirit echo the same message. Sometimes we sense God’s nearness and sometimes not. It is not whether God is near or not, rather it is our awareness or lack thereof that tells us whether God is near or not. One of the most difficult spiritual quests is this: to cultivate awareness of God’s nearness through all the life’s ups and downs.

“Discipleship is a way to curate your heart, to be attentive to and intentional about what you love,“ James K. A. Smith writes in his fine book, You Are What You Love. I like the choice of the word curate. To curate is to be creatively delicate with attention to fine details, and to be intentional and methodical about the process. The word is often used in the context of arts, museums, and performances, though not exclusively. It is a creative process and as such the process cannot be forced or manufactured. One has to look for inspiration and movements. Thus the curation of our heart requires creative attention and intentionality. Moreover, what we love ought to be the focus of the curation of our heart.

This is refreshingly welcoming to me because for so long evangelicals have had a parochial and truncated definition of what discipleship is. We have focused unevenly on mind, head, knowledge, or certain belief systems, making sure what we think we know are the truths. 

Discovering what we love invariably translates into what we do. To me, this is discipleship at its core that coincides with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. We first have to become people that want to do the right thing. Right heart leads to right action. Desire dictates action as spring precedes stream. And both are the direct and tangible result of love. We love, both with intent and action.

Pursuing our heart’s desire and what we love is an intimate individual journey. At the same time, it is an intricately communal one. Discovering and gifting each other through our heart’s desire can only be shared and enjoyed in communal settings. No person is an island. To be human is to have desire. We discover fully what we love only in community.

The process of curation involves paying attention to glimpses, hints, curiosities, and unguarded moments. The communal curation effort would ensure the space that is safe to undergo such half-baked and even vulnerable pursuits. Communal safe space would also create and safeguard slowing downs and pauses as “frenzied thoughts and activities” can easily flood our days. Frenzied thoughts and activities will continue to run our days unless we learn to slow down our souls. We need to pursue the spring, what is beneath. In the end, I believe we become what we love.