Weekly Meditations

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.

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.

In Him we live, move and have our being.   Acts 17:28

“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.