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

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.

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.

“Dr. Doctrine” is a wonderful comic book series that can be found on the shelves of many theological libraries right alongside the classic tomes.  The series sets up dialogues on complex theological issues in the idiom of a comic strip, a form that suggests that it’s geared to a much more fun-loving audience than a classroom lecture.

The issue dealing with the theology of the Trinity for instance begins with a patient who comes into Dr. Doctrine’s Theology Clinic  and asks for a Trinidectomy.  He wants to have his Trinity removed from his doctrine because he doesn’t really use it that much.  Dr. Doctrine throws his hands up saying, “What!  That’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard.  The doctrine of the Trinity is vital to your whole spiritual well-being!  To cut it out would be like removing your heart!”  The patient confesses that he really doesn’t understand how his Trinity works in such a vital way so the doctor writes out a prescription to help him.  He instructs him to simply read the gospels while paying close attention to the life of Jesus, and watching for signs of the Trinity.

It doesn’t take very long for anyone reading the New Testament to see that Jesus’ self-understanding is as someone who lives in divine community, in close relationship to the Father, as well as to the Holy Spirit.  This relationship is also revealed as one of perfect unity when, for instance, Jesus says, “The Father and I are one,” (Jn 10:30) or when He speaks of the Holy Spirit saying, “He will not speak on his own…He will take what is mine and make it known to you” (Jn 16:13).  We also see how oneness in the Godhead is articulated in terms of shared purpose and presence in relationship to us.  Our subjective relationship to the Trinity might actually be the best perspective from which to gaze into the mystery of the “Three in One.”

In our experience of God we are related in three distinct ways.  We relate to God as “above us,” “with us,” and “within us.”  In the gospels, the Father is often referred to as God “above us.”  Jesus, on the other hand, is called Emmanuel—God “with us.”  And the Spirit is identified as God “within us.”  Growing in the knowledge of God then means coming to know God through three particular expressions of our interaction with the Trinity—how, in God we live, move, and have our being.  Of course we must also keep in mind that we are not talking about a separateness in God, but only in the ways we experience God.

People who lack a Trinitarian theology often end up over-emphasizing one aspect of God over others.   Many people, for instance, experience God mostly as  “God above us”—as a principle or overarching truth of life.  They believe in God but don’t have much of a personal relationship with what they believe God to be.  Others might know God mostly in terms of Jesus’ purposes on earth.  They are actively involved with serving those purposes, but often without a strong need for submissive prayer or worship in their faith.  And others know God more exclusively from the perspective of their own inner sense of the divine.  They might have a growing relationship to God within them, but are not very aware of Christ in the world, nor of God as Other, with whom they are also related through objective prayer and worship.

Growing in our knowledge and experience of the Trinity then is not a matter of getting the algebra right or the correct grammar as much as knowing the fullness of our experience of God in these three expressions.  As “God above us,” our Father stands apart from us.  He is the Transcendence under which we live.  In this relationship we pray and relate to the Father just as Jesus did—as Divine Other.

As the Son, we experience God as “with us.”  Jesus, Emmanuel, is incarnate in our fleshly experience of life, in the very circumstances and human history in which we move.  He is the Lover of our souls who accompanies us, shepherds us and is with us to the end of ages.  It is Jesus’ saving mission that we seek to serve on earth.  And it is the Church, as the bride of Christ, that we gather to become in order to be with Him forever.

And finally, in our experience of the Holy Spirit, we recognize God as “within us.” As the immanent ground from which we have our being, the Holy Spirit purifies us in our relationship with the Father and moves us to love and serve the purposes of Jesus in this world.

Paul’s prayer for the Christians in Ephesus was that they would be able to grasp how wide and long and high and deep our God really is.  He desired that they would be “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:18-19).  May we too receive the apostle’s prayer.  As the fullness of the knowledge of God matures in our lives may we too grow in our appreciation of how wide and long, high and deep our God really is.

“You shall be as gods.” This was the deception that so appealed to Adam and Eve that they were willing to confuse their humanity in favour of what seemed to be a better deal for their lives.  How are we similarly tempted by such flattery in our lives?  How do we fall prey to the deceptive spirit that says to us, “You should be as gods?”

We all carry images of ourselves that can be said to be divine projections of who we wish we were.  Maybe you call it your ideal self—a projection of the person you think you ought to be.  Maybe it applies to your ideal body, your ideal status, your ideal of how you should act, or how people should relate to you.  Sometimes this is a good thing.  But more often than not it involves a blanket rejection of our humanity, a denial of the very God-given earthiness of who we truly are.

We all have difficulty accepting aspects of our humanity that fall short of the ideals we carry for ourselves.  There is of course nothing wrong with bettering yourself in life.  But if this comes from a spirit of guilt, or from anxieties we feel over the inadequacies of being human, it is certainly not the spirit by which God leads us.  It is more likely the voice of the accuser appealing to an inordinate sense of God-envy.  Tempted with its allure we risk succumbing to the very same suggestion that trapped our first parents:  “You really should be more like gods.”

Our idealized images of ourselves diminish us.  And then we wonder why we lack inner peace. The opposite of self-acceptance is to be anxious about the self that we are.  This might seem like basic pop psychology but, at its core, lies a fundamental theological error regarding our true sense of self.  And such errors always bear bad fruit in us.

There are two ways that the rejection of our humanity do so.  On the one hand, projections of our perfect self often puff us up.  We all know people who are “legends in their own minds.”  Perhaps we too at times overly relate to our ideal self in ways that appeal to our vanity.  Refusing to accept ourselves as anything less than we think we should be, we also project our idealized self onto others.  We are afraid of letting them see us in our unfinished state.  Because we reject our own poverty of spirit, we assume that others too will likely reject it. All this because we have believed the original lie that  “you should be more than what God made you to be.”

The other way that the ideal self erodes our soul is by the sense of failure and guilt we feel when we are so painfully aware of how we fall short of that ideal.  We end up loathing our poverty of spirit in the false belief that we should really be more divine than we are. We reject ourselves as we are, and this sets us up for a life of conditional love. Whenever we live up to our ideal persona we love ourselves, but we loathe who we are when we fall short of it.  And that’s clearly not how God loves you—God, whose heart is most moved by compassion precisely because of our poverty of spirit. And so should we also be moved to accept with compassion the very poverty that Jesus calls a blessed state.

What do you wrestle with in your sense of self that prevents you from fully accepting of your humanity?  What would it mean for you to embrace your poverty of spirit?  What would help you to accept the humus of who you are with the same compassion that God does?

Embracing the reality of our creaturehood sets us free from the lies of the imaginary, ideal self.   Let us welcome the earthiness of our lives as something that God has not only created, but also loves.

“Reverence stands in awe of something—something that dwarfs the self, that allows human beings to sense the full extent of our limits.  When we stop trying to act like gods ourselves, we will be led to the proper reverence of the creature for its Creator.”

Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World

The vocation of holiness is not something we often hear discussed among Christians in our day.  For some reason it seems to be a value that we have relegated to a past age, a quality that we no longer expect from ourselves in the same way our forebears did.  And yet the call to a sanctified life is no less imperative today than it was in past generations.  The Lord still commands that we be holy for the simple reason that He, in whose image we are made, is holy.

Among contemporary advocates of holiness Mother Teresa perhaps most readily comes to mind as this is a theme that repeatedly shows up in her writings.  In Come Be My Light, a compilation of letters written to her spiritual directors and various convents, the “saint of Calcutta” defines holiness in the most simple terms as she encourages her sisters saying, “Let us try to come as close as the human heart can come to the Heart of Jesus.” This is the essence of holiness—to be as close as possible, in identity and in action, to the heart and person of Christ.  In this we seek to reflect the sanctity that belongs to Him alone.

Biblically speaking, to be holy is to be consecrated, set aside for God.  It is an act of self-offering in which we invite the holiness of God to express itself in our lives.  Our motivation towards holiness comes from our love of God, but we can also be motivated by our love for others, as well as for the integrity of the Church.  Mother Teresa writes of her own response to this vocation,

I am determined to show my love for the Church by becoming very holy. I ask you as well—please, for the love of God and the love of others take the trouble to be holy.

Mother Teresa lists three offerings on our part that contribute to the consecration of our lives to God: the offering of time, of will, and of our submission to others. She speaks of time set aside for prayer as a first priority, more important even than our ministry or our relationship with others.  Of her own experience she writes, “I always make my holy hour with Jesus straight after Mass, so that I get the first two hours of each day with Jesus.  Before people and the sisters start using me, I let Him use me first.”

Her motivation for holiness comes from her deep love for the integrity of the Church.  She also finds motivation in her love for others and from her desire to give as much as she can to those she ministers to.   As she plainly states, “people are hungry for God. What a terrible meeting it would be with our neighbour if we give them only ourselves.”  Elsewhere she writes,

The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life. We need silence to be able to touch souls.

The second offering that she encourages from her sisters is that of the will.  In submission to God, Mother Teresa sees all circumstances in her life as coming from the freedom she has given to God’s will.  She encourages this same disposition in her sisters when she writes, “I pray for you that you let Jesus use you without consulting you.”  In her own experience of submission she revels saying, “Today I have made a new prayer—Jesus I accept whatever You give—and I give whatever You take.”

The third offering she encourages finally that of our submission to others.  In this Mother Teresa sees an action that is synonymous with submitting to God.  She exhorts her sisters saying,  “I only ask you to love one another as Jesus loves each one of you—for in loving one another you only love Jesus.”

Such offerings, placed on the altar of consecration, express our desire that God would make of our lives a sacred place for His activity.  Our own actions are then able to reflect something of the holiness of the Spirit to whom we are submitted.  Because God is holy, we can realistically hope to see this holiness mirrored in ourselves.

Jeremiah 17:8

Like the proverbial dust in the wind that inspired so many of my generation, much of my young adult life was spent wandering.  Hitchhiking back and forth across North America, backpacking in Europe, moving from one communal house to another, at one point I calculated that the longest I had stayed in one place over the course of five years was six months.  My life was like a ball bouncing on the pins of a roulette wheel as it spins around.  Eventually the wheel slows down and the ball falls into a slot, and I too finally settled down, got married, raised a family and established a career.  In other words, after years of unsettledness, my life finally became “rooted and established.”

I see a similar process happening in our relationship to prayer.  For many people, prayer is a destination that attracts them from a distance.  They might circle this attraction for years, keeping it topical, reading books to kindle the heart.  As we move in and out of relationship to this hope it’s easy to wonder if we will ever take this invitation seriously.  Will it ever become established in us as we sense it desires to be?

Fortunately, by God’s grace, people do eventually become rooted in the life-discipline of prayer.  Something finally quickens their conviction that this is a call they must respond to more seriously than they have.  Like the ball bouncing on the roulette wheel, they finally fall into its slot.  Prayer then becomes non-negotiable—the most precious pearl of their lives.  Only at this point can it be said that the person is “rooted and established” in the life of prayer.

In the meantime, it is fair to accept that it takes a long time for a sustained discipline of prayer to take root in a person’s life.  Like seed on stony ground, our enthusiasm rises for a season only to disappear again.  Or the seed of prayer simply gets choked in the thorns and thistles of our busy lives.  We should not be discouraged nor surprised by such glaring evidence of our fickle hearts.  God is not deterred.  Slowly and steadily, He is wooing each one of us from a casual to a more committed relationship.  Heaven’s final objective, as Scripture so often depicts, is a relationship more akin to marriage than to dating.

Eventually, through what Jesus calls “the perseverance of noble hearts” (Luke 8:15) the seed of prayer does take root in us and starts to bear its promised fruit.  It shifts from the periphery to become the central focus of our relationship with God.  To it we more consistently return for restoration, and from it we now draw the articulation of our lives.  In other words, by God’s grace, we find ourselves finally established (lit. “made stable”) in a committed relationship to that which our hearts have so long desired.

All true prayer promotes its own progress and increases our power to pray.

P.T. Forsyth

There is no more succinct way of expressing the dynamic union of heaven and earth than in Jesus’ petition to our Father that “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  It is a prayer that has absolute implications for all of creation as well as for the minutiae of our individual lives.  Jean-Pierre de Caussade, a 17th century Jesuit spiritual director best summarized this petition when he wrote, “Let God’s will be done; that is the whole of Scripture, the universal law.”

God calls us to conform to the movement of His will.  It is an imperative that comes not from an autocratic need on God’s part but from the loving hope the Creator has for His creatures. For it is only in submission to God’s movement that we ever fully become who we are.  As de Caussade puts it, “saints become saints only by living the life to which they have been called.”

To apply this petition to ourselves—to say to God “Thy will be done in me as it is in heaven”—requires nothing short of the same type of obedience that Jesus demonstrated in His own life when he said, “Whatever I see the Father do I do” (Jn 5:19).  Like Jesus, it is in our submission to the Spirit that God’s particular will becomes evident in our lives.  De Caussade writes of the close relationship between our self-offering and God’s will being manifest.

Obedience to God’s undefined will depends entirely on our surrender to it, our preparedness to do anything, or nothing.  Like a tool that, though it has no power in itself, when in the hands of the craftsman, can be used for any purpose within the range of its capacity and design.  Such souls are like molten metal, filling whatever vessel God chooses to pour them into.

St. Frances de Sales, a spiritual director who lived a century earlier, also spoke of such fluidity in our submission.  In his book, Introduction to the Devout Life, he writes,

We must always be rendering ourselves pliable and tractable to God’s good pleasure, as though we were wax.  A hundred times during the day we should turn our gaze upon God’s loving will, making our own will melt into it.

We also have the contemporary example of Mother Teresa who sought to live her life in perfect submission to God’s will.  Far from passive, such obedience requires the greatest degree of self-control and spiritual focus in its offering.  Mother Teresa speaks of the progressive maturity that a life of submissiveness will entail.  She writes,

The first duty required of souls is self-discipline; the second is self-surrender; the third requires great humility, a humble and willing disposition and a readiness to follow the movement of grace which motivates everything if we simply respond willingly to all its guidance.

These are people who know, each in their own way, what it means to intentionally submit their will to God’s.  And they have all, as de Caussade suggested, become who they are, and born such a wonderful influence on life, as the direct result of their desire for God’s will to be done in them as it is in heaven.

The prayer within all prayer is “Thy will be done.”  My prayer is Thy Will.  Thou didst create it in me.  It is more Thine than mine.

P.T. Forsyth

Paul encouraged the Christians in Ephesus to ”be completely humble and gentle” (Eph. 4:2). Jesus also, from the perfection of His own example, invites us to emulate these same traits. They are evidence of grace in Christians who, because of their faith, are gently poised in relationship to all the circumstances of their lives.

The spirit of gentleness receives life graciously, without need to manipulate or force it to be other than it is. It measures its own engagement with life more minimally than the spiritual footprint left by those who are anxious. We lose the gentle spirit whenever our lives are overly defined by impatience, or by imperatives for the way things should be.

In his book, Spirituality and the Gentle Life, Adrian Van Kaam describes the gentle person as “one in whom there is a friendly accord between themselves and their life situation.” This disposition is most expressive of faith and grace. Van Kaam describes the freedom that gentleness produces in us.

Gentleness is an attitude of letting be, combined with a patient abiding with myself or with the person, task, or problem God calls me to be involved in. This attitude leads to peace and contentment. The gentle person is more free. He can take himself and the world as they are because he feels free to be himself and to let all things be with the same gentility.

Gentleness is also directly related to our experience of God. Aggressiveness of spirit diminishes our congeniality—the trait most needed to live in communion with the humility of God. It is difficult to be open to the gentle spirit of Christ when we find ourselves in an agitated state. Gentleness, therefore, is a prerequisite to remaining in sensate relationship with God. In the spirit of gentleness it becomes easier to pray, to meditate, and to stay attuned to the movements of God’s Spirit. Van Kaam writes,

Gentle reflection proceeds in an atmosphere of leisure and repose. Its quiet presence to divine things is animated by a desire to be at home with God in love—a love that itself is a grace of God.

The more gentle we are in relationship to God’s presence within us, the more hospitable we will seem to the Spirit. As St. John of the Cross noted, “God dwells in some souls as though in His own house; in others He dwells as though a stranger in a strange house, where they do not permit him to do or touch anything.” A gentle soul is more disposed to welcome God’s movement than someone who feels they need to control their spiritual experience.

Jesus presents Himself as gentle and humble of heart. He then invites us to be closely yoked with Him in the character of His life. By imitating Christ in these virtues we prepare an environment for the Lord to more fully dwell in us, as though in His own house.

What we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him.

1John 3:2

There are two distinct life experiences that serve to re-awaken in us the need to “go back to our Father’s house.”  More often than not we are motivated by either a strong experience of desire, or one of suffering.  And it would be easy to imagine which one our Father would prefer for us.

Feelings of love and desire for God naturally lead us to more intently seek relationship.  When people are first dating, no one has to remind the guy to call the girl, or for either of them to keep their Friday nights open just in case there might be an opportunity to get together.  Love keeps the other person in mind and there is nothing more important than being together.  There are times when our relationship with God is motivated by a similar attraction of love.

But there is another motivation that comes from a more desperate expression of our need for God.  This usually happens when we have been trying for too long to live the Christian life on our own.  Like a branch that has withered, we feel burdened and discouraged about our lives.  We are flailing and yet we persist in this mode even though our plight seems more and more hopeless.  We reach a point where we feel we can go no further.  We are ready to give up.  And yet, somehow, we still stubbornly persist.  Eventually our circumstances and the gradual drying up of our wills force us, usually as a last resort, to return to God.  It was a long time in coming, but suffering finally brought us back to our senses.

The painful result of living life on his own terms was what motivated the prodigal son to finally decide to return to his father’s house.  From the father’s point of view, it was surely grievous that this recourse was necessary.  But such is the high risk that God has taken in granting us the freedom to choose Him, or not.

There is wisdom to be gained from the experience of inner distress when, for lack of God, we suffer unnecessarily in our lives.  This type of pain eventually teaches us that an ounce of prevention is better than the pound of cure needed to recover our stability and peace in God. The art of spiritual maintenance then becomes a matter of recognizing the very desire we feel for God as a gift that we are to cherish and not take for granted.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, “God sometimes uses pain, like a megaphone, to get our attention.”  May we learn to avoid, as much as possible, the necessity for such by more readily heeding the still small voice that reminds us of our love and desire for God.  Even now, it whispers to all who are straying, “it is time to come home to the Father.”