Back in the late nineties I remember sitting at a table
outside in our back yard pouring over two programs of study leading to two
different Masters degrees. One was the counseling degree being offered at
Trinity Western and the other, the Christian Studies degree being offered at
Regent College, where my focus would be courses in spiritual
formation/spiritual theology. I still vividly remember how alive my heart would
feel when I looked at the courses on spiritual formation. I knew which
university I was meant to apply to and what a rich experience that wound up
being. I had the opportunity to sit in on lectures taught by Jim Houston,
Eugene Peterson, Bruce Hindmarsh, three people who held the chair of Spiritual
Theology at different points in the history of Regent College. It is also a way
of hinting at just how long it took to complete the degree along with marriage
and family commitments, raising two very lively children and my involvement
with our church community.
Around the same time, from my ongoing connection with my spiritual director, Steve Imbach, I realized that my true heart vocation was in spiritual direction and Steve agreed to take me on as his apprentice. This was before Soulstream, an organization that Steve founded, even began to officially offer classes in spiritual formation and spiritual direction.
So back in the late 90s working on a degree in spiritual theology at Regent and Steve training me to be a spiritual director became a perfect fit, and an expression and refining of my own ongoing longing and journey to draw close to God in intimacy. I officially began offering spiritual direction from my home office about 10 years ago. I say officially because I have been involved in people’s lives at a heart level for many years prior to making the conscious decisions that led to the vocational training and path I am on today. For as long as I can remember, my heart has been preoccupied with questions of meaning and purpose, especially how to create meaning and bring healing out of deep places of suffering in my life and the lives of others. This large aching life question seems to be the epicenter, the starting place of what has forced me to search for God, thirst for God, cry out for God and listen for His voice to comfort, heal and direct me.
Without really knowing it, living into this large aching life question has been significant in understanding the contemplative way. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke says, “I beg you…to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”( Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet p.35)
I think one of the best ways to describe my journey and relationship with God this past decade and for most of my life really, is God’s invitation to come home to myself and perhaps the art of Christian living for me is learning how to stay home. Part of the Holy Spirit’s work in my life has been to reveal that I am in a prison and rattle the bars of my personal prison and guide me to the open door to freedom. In prayer I have been slowly coaxed out of hiding, out of a prison of false thinking and feelings and coming home to reality. The loving counselor says, “Look what you are doing to yourself,” and “I can help you with that,” and slowly with God’s help I am moving from a fear based existence to a love based existence. The Persian poet, Hafiz (c.1320-1389), describes my predicament well:
Beautiful Creature
There is a beautiful creature living
in a hole you have
dug,
so at night I set fruit and grains and little pots of wine and milk
beside your soft earthen
mounds,
and I often sing to you,
but still, my dear, you do not come out.
I have fallen in love with someone
who is hiding inside
of you.
We should talk about this problem,
otherwise I will never
leave you
alone!
Can it be that true whole prayer is nothing but welcoming God’s gracious and courteous love so beautifully described in this poem? This amazing love has also been described by Julian of Norwich in her book, Revelations of Divine Love. In her book, Julian records a series of visions of the suffering Jesus. After reporting a long and detailed litany of his suffering, Jesus poses a question to Julian. He says, “Are you pleased I suffered for you? I said, Yes, dear Lord, in your mercy: yes, good Lord, bless you always. Then our good Lord Jesus replied, “If you are pleased, then I too am pleased. This is my joy, my bliss, my endless liking that I was ever able to suffer for you. For truly, if I could have suffered more I would have suffered more. …This then is what he means: “How can there be anything I would not do for love of you?” I am stunned by this glimpse into the epicenter of God’s heart of love, not heavy hearted, but surprisingly joyous and optimistic, and boundless in self giving.
I am experiencing my homecoming to God in two ways, in the
way of the prodigal son and of the older son. In the way of the prodigal I wake
up as it were, in the grip of my besetting sins and attachments and turn my
face towards God and cry out for help. I
experience God’s merciful and
tenacious love inviting me to stop clinging to my lesser gods and let go.
However it has not all been about letting go. Coming home to God has also been
about the invitation to embrace life in all its fullness, to practice living in
resurrection joy and freedom. I am repeatedly surprised by encounters with an
exuberant and generous and childlike God who reveals that I have the heart of
the older brother, duty bound, terribly over responsible and stingy with self
and others…where the call is to loosen up and really live an abundant life.
Over the years God has been repeatedly saying to me, “Everything that is mine
is yours.” So I am experiencing these two movements in coming home to my true
self, both in letting go and embracing my inheritance as a beloved child of God. The poet Hafiz
expresses well what it is has been like for me to live out this tension before
the loving eyes of God:
My Sweet Crushed Angel
You have
not danced so badly, my dear,
trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One.
You have waltzed with great style, my sweet, crushed angel,
to have ever neared God’s heart at all.
Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow, and even His
best musicians are not always easy to hear.
So what if the music has stopped for a while.
So what if the price of admission to the Divine is out of reach tonight.
So what, my sweetheart, if you lack the ante to gamble for real love.
The mind and the body are famous for holding the heart ransom,
but Hafiz knows the Beloved’s eternal habits. Have patience,
for He will not be able to resist your longings
and charms for long.
You have not danced so badly, my dear,
trying to kiss the Magnificent
One.
You have actually waltzed with tremendous style,
my sweet, O my sweet,
crushed
angel.
Another way that I would describe my journey in prayer, or growing into an understanding of my life being God’s prayer, is becoming increasingly aware of God’s communication to me, through all of life. I love the way Merton describes this awareness in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation. He says, “Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love. This is no new idea. Christ in the parable of the sower long ago told us that “The seed is the word of God.” We often think this applies only to the word of the Gospel as formally preached in churches on Sundays (if indeed it is preached in churches any more!). But every expression of the will of God is in some sense a “word” of God and therefore a “seed” of new life. The ever-changing reality in the midst of which we live should awaken us to the possibility of an uninterrupted dialogue with God….a dialogue of deep wills.” (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 14)
Merton’s words are very significant to me because they so evocatively describe the possibility of becoming open and receptive to the living Word in any given moment in the unfolding moments of my day. I like to imagine my heart being like a field, and asking God to make the top soil soft and receptive to the winged seeds that He sends my way…that I would become increasingly aware and receptive to God’s action within me and around me. God’s winged seeds have come to me in the form of beauty, nature, music, art, dance movement, close friends, and family, Scripture, church community, hard times and good times.
One particularly quirky winged seed came my way recently via
one of my directees. She showed up at my door one day full of enthusiasm
because she had just found what she was looking for, a hookah pipe for an
anniversary gift for her husband. Before I could even think to myself, “Isn’t
truth stranger than fiction,” she added…”oh yes and the Palestinian couple I
bought it from knew you and so I told them I was on my way to your place, and
guess what….they are selling a beautiful stringed instrument that I think you
would love to own!” And she was
right. I checked into it and wound up buying the instrument, called an Oud. This
surprising and comical unfolding of events led to some reflection on an
important underlying theme that ties together many seemingly serendipitous circumstances
in my life through the years. I have come to realize that I was a lost and broken
instrument who has been found by a Master who is lovingly restoring me into my
original beauty and encouraging me to sound out the one beautiful note which is
my life.
Karin Dart is a spiritual director in Abbotsford, BC and a harpist / song-writer with the Taize group, Gemma.
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