Weekly Meditations

I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother.      Psalm 131:1b-2a

There is an old Christian folk song that expresses well the peace that comes to those who live in the experience of faith.  The words are, “I know not what my future holds. I have no way of knowing. But I know the One who holds my future, and I have no fear of where I’m going.”  Such a disposition of trust, I believe, is one of the more likely fruits of contemplative prayer as people learn to exchange the spirit of fear for that of faith.

Many Christians do not enjoy the benefits of a life of faith.  Though they believe in God, they do not necessarily live in the experience of faith that should accompany that belief.  They may, for instance, accept the theology that God is with them, and yet, for the most part, they walk alone in their day.  They may believe that Christ forgives their sins and yet they continue to suffer from guilt and shame.  They believe the Scriptures that teach us how God provides for us and yet they are fearful for their security.  They believe their future is in God’s hands, and yet they fret because they are unable to discern that future for themselves.

For all who ail from such lack of faith, Psalm 131 offers an effective prescription for change.  It is an invitation to leave behind the anxieties of faithless belief, and to embrace the maturity of trust whereby we rest more securely in God’s good care.  The Psalm contrasts the turmoil of an overly reasoned life with that of quiet faith.  It encourages us to let go of the adult concerns of the one in favour of the child-like trust of the other.  David’ sentiment is of one who says to himself,  “I have had enough of worrying about my life’s direction.  I am tired of dealing with the unknowability of matters too great for me. I am ready for plan B.”

If you too are tired of trying to work out the Rubik’s cube of your life, David offers another approach.  Rather than obsess over that which, at best, can only be speculated, he has instead learned to quiet his heart and to trust the unknowable aspects of his life to God.  Because he has faith that the unknowns are not unknown to God, he can rest more securely in the God-ordained mystery of his blind spots.  With the folk singer he too can sing, “I know the One who holds my future, and I have no fear of where I’m going.”  This, as David suggests, is the trusting disposition of a weaned child.

The image of a weaned child represents a healthy detachment from the type of clinging that often keeps our relationship with God at an infant stage.  A weaned child is one who is free of the primal fears of babyhood.  It no longer suffers the separation anxiety common to toddlers who see their mothers solely in terms of security and provision.  The child who is weaned is secure enough in his mother’s care to not be anxious about losing her care.  This more confident disposition of faith also represents a greater freedom for the mother as it gives her permission to be who she is, independent of the child’s immediate sense of need. The weaned child allows the mother to love the child, in her own way.

Love gives freedom to the other person to be who they are, and it is a mark of mature spirituality when we trust God to love us according to God’s own freedom.  In confident faith we allow God to hold our future without the distrust implied by our anxieties over what we can’t see. Weaned from the imperatives of our need-based relationship, we are now more able to live in the freedom that faith promises to those who trust their lives to God’s care.  As the song suggests, the more confident we are that the Lord holds our future, the less concerned we need be of where we are going.

When my spirit grows faint within me,
it is you who know my way.

Psalm 142:3

This is the day the LORD has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it.   Psalm 118:24

St. Ignatius of Loyola stressed the importance of taking time to review our spiritual experiences in order to more deeply relish the truth of what they are saying to us.  His Spiritual Exercises, for instance, begin with a review of our whole life, examining all the events, year after year, that have shaped us to be the person we are today.  Ignatius also stressed the importance of reviewing, after every prayer session, our time with God.  We are to recall moments when we sensed the nearness or absence of God, and learn what we can from that particular experience of prayer.

At the end of each day Ignatius also taught his followers to practice what he called the “Awareness Examen.”  The Examen is simply a matter of taking time each evening to go over your day, seeking to learn from your experiences where you should amend your ways, or what God might affirm in your day.  So important was this exercise to Ignatius that he instructed his followers that, even if they were to neglect all other prayers, they should not forsake this one.

In this prayer we re-examine our day, remembering what we did, what we said, and what we felt in the many things we experienced.  It is an opportunity to deepen our relationship to what we have received; to relive the high and low moments, and to learn what we can from them.  By re-experiencing our day we have opportunity to objectify the things that happened to us, now removed from the confusion of the moment.  At arms-length, we can better observe ourselves than when we are in the midst of the fray.

Through the Awareness Examen we appreciate more deeply the measure of a day.  In all its varied experiences, this was the particular day given to us by God.  We give thanks for every occasion that God has used from it to shape us.  We remember the events, we remember the people, but we especially remember how we felt about what was happening.  Where were the moments of joy?  What were the difficult parts of our day?  How did we feel at those moments?  Where did we recognize signs of God’s presence?  When did we feel most alone or lost?  We talk with God about our experiences.  From the perspective of hindsight we thank God even for the occasions that challenged us in our day.  If nothing else, the Awareness Examen helps us treat each day as something precious, full of much more mystery and opportunities for growth than we realized at the time of our first living it.

Consider exploring this important prayer in the weeks ahead.  Make it a special time with God.  Have a cup of tea, make a hot chocolate, or pour yourself a glass of wine.  Enjoy the silence as you prayerfully go over the hours of your day, from the time you awoke to now.  You might be surprised at first how hard it is to remember what you did this morning, but a little practice will help you better access your short-term memory.  Let your day become the subject of your prayer.  Let it teach you what you did well or what you might’ve done differently.  Take account of all that happened and how you experienced each event.  Learn from the mistakes you made and appreciate more deeply the good moments by reliving them in gratitude for God’s grace in your day.  With a growing appreciation of the worth of a day you might even find yourself looking forward to tomorrow, and to the opportunity the Awareness Examen will give you to re-live each day as you go over it again with God.

Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Psalm 90:12

Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.           John 7:38

In his book, The Transforming Friendship, Dr. James Houston offers a helpful definition of the spiritual life when he says that we are “in the discipline of exercising the heart of desire for God.”  This simple statement wonderfully expresses the motivation, the direction, as well as the ultimate destination of the spiritual life—that we are in a relationship of mutual desire with God.  Like two lovers running to embrace each other, God draws near to us as we draw near to God (James 4:8).

To bring into focus the many longings of our heart so that they find expression in the foundational desire that underlies all our seeking is our spiritual direction.  And the more intentional we are in participating with this underlying desire the more we will discover the living waters of God’s highest vision for our humanity.   In the merging of our desires with God’s desire we will find our lives abundantly expressed.

As we are weaned from the many alternatives that misdirect our yearnings for God we discover a greater sense of unity in our lives.  In the consolidation of our heart’s longings we become more directly engaged with their true object.  We also find, as our desires align with those of God, that our longings become fewer, but stronger.  It is a slow process, but one that ultimately leads us from dissipation to an undivided heart.

A sustained desire for prayer is evidence of the extent to which our lives are given over to God.  If we are self-oriented, our longing for God and our motivation to prayer will be quenched.  But the more we abandon ourselves to God’s desires, the more sustained we will be in our zeal.  As Houston puts it,

Self-confidence robs us of the incentive to pray as we should.  But when all our significance, security, identity and future are in the hands of God, then prayer is bound to follow.

The spiritual life invites us to return to our Father’s house.  And the countless choices we make each day are what determine our direction, either towards or away from God.  They reveal the truth of Jesus’ teaching that  “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Luke 12:34).

Like the Pacific salmon which swim upstream, returning to their place of origin, we too are on a return journey to the fount of our lives.  When, with the Psalmist, we too can say, “all my fountains are in you” (Ps. 87:7) we will find the “living waters” that Jesus promised flowing abundantly from our lives.

Unless your soul is continually lifted up to God, your flesh will drag it down.  Therefore, you must renew your determination for the spiritual life each day.
St. Frances de Sales

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.