Imago Dei Christian Community

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He has filled the hungry with good things       Luke 1:53

Every saint has come to recognize the one basic requirement for a growing spirituality—that in order to be filled with the fullness of Christ, we must first be emptied of that which already fills us.  As Mother Teresa so plainly puts it,

God cannot fill what is already full, He can fill only emptiness –deep poverty.  We have to be completely empty to let God do what He wills so that we can receive Him fully in our life and let Him live His life in us.

To be open space for God is to imitate Christ, who “made Himself nothing” (Phil. 2:7).  In the example of His own life, Jesus modeled the posture of self-emptying “kenosis” as the most perfect vehicle through which the Father’s will might be expressed.  Mother Teresa urges her sisters to follow the Lord in this same disposition saying,

God has shown His greatness by using our nothingness.  So let us always serve Him by remaining in our nothingness, so as to give God a free hand to use us without even consulting us.

Incarnate within us, Jesus continues the life He lived on earth—that of complete submission to the Father’s will.  The Lord receives the offering of our compliance and then draws us deeper into His own relationship to the Father.  Regarding the action of Jesus’ kenosis, now continuing in us, Mother Teresa writes,

Jesus wants to relive His complete submission to His Father in you today.  Allow Him to do so. Take away your eyes from your self and rejoice that you have nothing, that you are nothing, that you can do nothing.

Prayer is what helps us to be more given to God.  But a life consecrated to the will of God is always challenged by our propensity to fill our lives by our own volition.   Recognizing this, Mother Teresa wisely asks her sisters to pray for her, that she would not be tempted with self-reliance.  Even when struggling in the depths of spiritual darkness she writes,

Pray for me that in this darkness I do not light my own light, nor fill this emptiness with my self.  I want with my whole will only Jesus. Pray for me that He may use me to the full.

Saints, over the centuries, have demonstrated to us how to live according to the paradoxes of the spiritual life—that to become more, we must become less; that to be filled, we must become empty; that in order to gain, we must first let go.  Their obedience to such instincts, and the fruit they have borne as a result, give us confidence to believe that those who offer themselves as space for God will find that space gloriously filled.

Perfect faith is when we are nothing but space for God to be God in us.
Fr. Simon Tugwell

If then I do not grasp the meaning of what someone is saying, I am a foreigner to the speaker, and he is a foreigner to me.                                          1Cor. 14:11

Being immersed in a foreign language can be mentally exhausting.  Every sign, menu or map represents a new learning curve as we try to decipher what is not our first mode of communication.  The spoken word is even more challenging.  Until our capacity to track a new language grows, the hyper-focus required to pick up a word here or there is something we can only sustain for short periods.  We soon lose our grip and once again resign ourselves to its unintelligibility.

The experience I describe comes from recent memory of time spent in northern Spain.  I know enough Spanish to make it worth listening to people speaking it.  I can pick up a few words here and there and usually get the gist of what is being said.  And with every new phrase I learn I have a better grip on the language.  But it happens often enough that I lose the thread of conversation.  Someone speaks too fast and I am overwhelmed by my inability to find entrance into this language.  Whatever hope there was for communication gets garbled by words that now alienate more than give me access to the other person.  I think my relationship with God is often like that too.

I can be going along fine in my spiritual life feeling, for the most part, that I have a pretty good grasp of this language.  I get the gist of what God is saying to me and how I am supposed to respond.  But such competence is short-lived.  Things happen often enough in prayer and in the circumstances of my life that I don’t fully understand how to participate with.  The language goes by too fast.  Or maybe it’s just that God is using bigger words.  Whatever the case, I end up feeling quite “lost in translation.”

It’s always disconcerting to know that someone is trying to communicate with you and you have no idea what they are saying.  Even more so when that other person is God.  What am I supposed to be hearing?  What does God want me to do?  I feel confused, not to mention a fair bit of trepidation knowing that the Lord has something important to say, but I can’t tell what it is.

But if we compare our capacity to understand God with learning any other language it might be easier to accept our miscommunications as a natural stage of growing in fluency.  To get beyond God 101 we should not be surprised that we will need to learn a more complex vocabulary.  And this we glean best from those who are more fluent than we are.

Anyone learning a new language will do well to spend time with others who speak, or who are also learning this language themselves.  By discussing our spiritual lives with others or with a spiritual director, and by studying the works of various spiritual writers, we not only increase our word base, but are also introduced to new expressions, fresher metaphors and better ways of understanding the initiatives of God.   Our vocabulary will grow as we are immersed in spiritual culture, and the particular dialogue that we share at Imago Dei should give us every reason to hope for greater proficiency in our communications with God, and more fluency in our spiritual lives.

In him (Christ) it has always been “Yes.”                2Cor. 1:19

Throughout history, the spiritual path for many Christians has been largely defined in terms of renunciation of the world or of anything deemed unspiritual.  It is called the via negativa.  Through mortification of the flesh, self denial and abstinence, the spiritual life is understood as primarily against something.  But others have walked a different path that is based much more on attraction than rejection.  It is the via positiva, and St. Francis of Assisi is perhaps the best known example of this disposition.

Francis was motivated in his conversion not so much by what he stood against, but by what he sought.  He fell in love, for instance, with the virtue of humility, welcoming opportunities for relationship with whatever might diminish him.  Instead of suppressing pride he simply exalted humility.  His approach to wealth was similar.  Rather than condemn riches, he cherished the precious pearl of poverty.  He embraced what he called Lady Poverty as one would cleave to a lover.  In all this Francis exemplified the via positiva.   Rather than curse the darkness of his sins, he simply lit the candles of their opposites.  The via positiva affirms in us our desire for the things of God, and asserts our faith that “in Christ, all things are yes.”

Our motivation for the spiritual life should always be a positive one.   It should appeal to our desire for virtue rather than our abhorrence, asking us who we want to be more than who we don’t want to be.  Love for something is a much more positive catalyst for change than the energy spent building up an aversion to the things we wish were different.  This applies both to personal conversion as well as to social change.  When we pursue something we love rather than counter something we hate, our vision is much more sustained in a spirit of hope.  That is why gratitude also plays a key role in helping maintain a positive spiritual direction.  Gratitude focuses our attention on what we affirm rather than what we disdain in our lives.

Francis did not see life as a problem to be solved but more as a hope to be attained.  Humility, in his case, was not simply a way to counter his pride.  He loved it for its own sake.  What difference might it make for you to explore the Franciscan way in your own life—to pursue peace rather than flee turmoil, to seek gentleness and humility rather than rail against your anger and pride, to cherish holiness rather than try to solve the problems of sin in your life?  In other words, how much more fruit would our spiritual lives bear if we let the positive vision of what we desire be our incentive for change more than the negative vision of what we don’t want.  It is easy to see how such an approach to faith would be much more attractive to us, and to others as well.