In out-of-the-way places of the heart,

Where your thoughts never think to wander,

This beginning has been quietly forming,

Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

 

For a long time it has watched your desire,

It watched you play with the seduction of safety,

Simultaneously hearing waves of the beckoning unknown rise and relent,

Wondered would you always live like this.

 

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,

And out you stepped onto new ground,

Your eyes young again with energy and dream,

A path of plentitude opening before you.

 

Though your destination is not yet clear

You can trust the promise of this opening;

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning

That is at one with your life’s desire.

 

Awaken your spirit to adventure;

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will be at home in a new rhythm,

For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

I’ve been working out a Word in me for 2016. I’m calling it the Year of Abandon.

Ready to leave some things behind – some things that haven’t served me, and even a lot of things that have. Ready to accept loss as a part of life. Ready to commit fully to something, to completely live…and still know how to say good-bye.

Mostly it’s time to abandon who I thought I was. Leave her behind. Pack up what I can carry, take one last look at what I thought would be my home forever, prepare to travel unencumbered, and set out for the new.

Abandonment has an uneasy tone to it. And I like how uncomfortable it makes me feel. No one wants to be abandoned, nor to abandon anything.

It’s like quitting midway. A work in progress you leave sitting untouched. There’s a sense that there’s still usefulness there in what remains…but nevertheless, something urgent calls you on. You must go. You must leave it. You must.

The call to abandon starts out softly, but everyday becomes more urgent….steady, consistent, obvious. Something is uneasy. A longing to be whole. The awareness of feeling incomplete. No…divided is a better word. Something old and familiar lingers heavy, threatening the resignation.This growing sense that somehow the joy that has always seemed so elusive suddenly feels attainable, but demanding something of you as well.

Then a loud whisper, “Joy is in honoring her.” Not this her you are abandoning, the other her, she who calls you to set out into the unknown. She tells you, there is a light on the path, and all you must do is walk. And you feel you must heed this voice. It sounds wise, like Presence, like a forgotten companion, like a dear friend to your weary soul. Weary of trying, desperate to be. You go.

She tells you, “Joy is in honoring the gifts you’ve been given…nurture them in winter, and give them away in the spring.” She tells you that your tendency to cling, to hold on, your refusal to let go, this is what can wreck a soul.

There is irony is this. Because there is a recklessness about abandon. It gives everything up. It lets everything go. It forsakes what it knows. It holds nothing captive. It takes no ownership. It is under no influence. It insists upon being unhindered.

It is a higher-self freedom. A sustained “Yes” in my soul. An abandoning to something…

And up there, in that thin air, Joy unfolds itself.

“Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans; that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.”

The illustration above is of the magi, or Three Wise Men. They mark the season of Advent for me. Advent being, this journey, (or really)…a willingness to embark on a journey towards some light that calls us. Like the magi, who saw a star and began to follow it towards what they believed, Advent invites us to ask many questions – about what we believe and where we might be going.

The Gospel of Matthew tells this story of wise men from the east who came to Jerusalem asking, “Where is the child who has been born…? For we observed his star at its rising and have come to pay him honor.”  These men of wisdom, knowledge and science…were also believers.They had certain facts, based on observations, but their knowledge of science didn’t seem to limit their faith…it initiated it.

I think of how often we allow science, facts, logic to interfere with belief. To know, is a guiding principle in our lives. We are educated to be critical thinkers and ascertain truth based on the analysis we undertake. We form thesis based on careful research of life and experience. 2+2 equals 4. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. These are more than observations, they become proven facts – mathematical and physical laws. If asked to believe that 2+2 just may indeed equal 5, our rational minds could not easily travel to this absurd place of impossibility. It is simply wrong. Our rational minds could not, but perhaps our more childlike wonder-filled spirits may begin to imagine, a world that was not limited by knowledge, but a world excited by miracles and magic.

This is why I love Advent and the Christmas season. It’s an invitation to imagine a world. This world is more than a place where a child was born to a virgin teenage girl. It’s a place where a child was born to be a perfect light in a dark world. A child come to light the way for us to find our own way back to the divinity inherent in us all. The rational mind will say, “Impossible…if there ever was such a light, it’s surely gone out now…I’ve seen too much, and done too much to believe such a simple fairytale.” But the fairytale is not the story…the story that remains is, we are all this light.  All little lights born in a manger, into a dark world full of fear and violence. And as life goes on, our lights grow dimmer, eventually overshadowed by the dark spots that slowly and persistently mar and cover us. We make observations along the way from our own experiences – a violent childhood, a broken heart, a dream deferred, a secret shame – these become our facts of life that only belief in a miracle can undo.

The miracle says what reality cannot.  The miracle tells a story that is beyond the mind. The miracle asks that we commit to believing a divine truth, even when the facts undoubtedly prove our terrible, more present reality.

The wise men had all the facts too. Then they observed this star. They were astronomers, who’d likely seen thousands of stars, but this star they chose to Follow. They followed this star beyond science, beyond knowledge, beyond experience, and found themselves on a spiritual journey.

The alternative to believing what violence, brokenness and shame has told us we are, is to trust that everything we’ve experienced has occurred, and is occurring, to compel us towards a deeper understanding of who we truly are and who God is for us and for this world. Yet, trust, is the very thing that most often holds us back from belief. How can we trust something that doesn’t make sense? In a world that says we get what we deserve, how can we trust a miracle that says, regardless of what we’ve done or what has been done to us, we are all called children of the light?

The wise men set their hearts to trust that what they knew WAS. There was no conflict between knowledge and belief in the impossible. They were astronomers and believers. And they let a star lead them into a foreign city and asked, “Where is the child?”

“Where are you, child, this Advent season?” 

“What do you know?”

“Can you believe in the miracle that you are?” 

“Will you commit to the possibility that you too are on a journey towards a new light?” 

“Can you recognize the light that seems to beckon you?” 

“Can you get in touch with your deepest desire at this moment in your life?”

“How can you be be faithful to the light that calls you?”

“What movement or inner direction does this Advent season suggest to you?” 

The wise men chose to move towards honoring what they observed.

My advent prayer is to honor what I observe within myself and commit to showing up to honor the light that calls me, to respect this star, to be faithful to the woman I see becoming in me.

Won’t you join me?

I call myself a contemplative.  And lately, as I take rest to reconnect with my spiritual practice, I realize not only had I lost touch with the core of my contemplative self, but that many others do not understand the nature of contemplation or what it means to be a contemplative.

I’ve always been a thinker, even a self-confessed over-thinker. It’s kind of a pre-requisite for being a writer. Always ideas, always an active imagination, always an ongoing dialogue in my head, always a propensity to being still, because after all, you must be still enough to capture an idea when it comes.  But being a contemplative doesn’t just suggest that one spends hours on end mulling over the meaning of life. Contemplation is a practice of cultivating an attitude of listening and responding to the movement of God in our lives. William J. Barry, who has written a lot about the practice of spiritual direction and contemplation says that, contemplation begins “when a person stops being totally preoccupied with his own concerns and lets another person, event, or object take his attention.” Contemplation then means a movement away from self-absorption towards becoming absorbed in a Being beyond oneself.

Contemplative prayer, more recognizably known as meditation, is the practice of going beyond oneself. And it is very challenging. As I sat in meditation this morning, my thoughts were going a mile a minute. The goal of contemplative prayer is not having no thoughts, rather it is allowing thoughts to come and pass, without latching onto them and being carried away by the stream of thoughts that pass constantly. That’s what makes the practice of meditation so difficult. Training the mind not follow its every whim is daily exercise and it can be a frustrating, never-ending journey. But this is the spiritual life. And at its core, a commitment to the spiritual life is a commitment to the work of freeing oneself from self-absorption and self-preoccupation. And when we are free from our self-determined ideas about who we are and what we must do, we are open to the movement of God and able to hear more clearly the activity to which God invites us to.

It’s easy to be busy doing, not so easy to get busy being. But the truth we all confront at some point in our lives, and the source of most all discontent is coming to terms with the reality that what we are doing does not wholly satisfy us. The question of the contemplative is always, “Who am I being?” And the answer to that question lay not in the doing, but always in the being. It can be a scary place to live, in the being of who we are, and we will always come up with every good reason not to stop and rest there.