Category Archives: Art of Depth

May 19, 2017

Cemetery In My Mind: Midnight Oil

By Andrew

The Australian band Midnight Oil are back together and touring the world. Their Great Circle Tour is circuiting the globe with the band’s distinctive sound and message. Politics, the environment, social justice, and the ‘human condition’: all are featured. Distraction and lethargy are not an option. The prophets have returned to wake up the dead and jolt the living.

I had a search through their catalogue to find a song that might be of use for us. While most of their music is decidedly action-focused, there are some that attempt an ‘introspective kick-in-the pants’. Cemetery in My Mind is one such song.

For me the message of the song is blunt: what do you want to be – death alive or living a life?

There is a dynamic in culture that distracts from purpose, from meaning, from the heart’s calling. It would have us in the mall, the shopping centre, consumers. How many of us seek to salve emptiness with the latest product or device?

Life as going through the motions, life as avoidance of hurts, life as fear of possibilities: all this can make a cemetery of the mind and life.

What of our dreams, our purpose, our meaning, our calling? How do we find these? How do we deepen in them? Is it too late? Purpose, meaning, calling: what is the experience of these things?

When life becomes dry enough, when dreams die, when no direction affects us enough, despite fear we can start to ask deeper questions: ‘You can fall, but can you rise?’

In the now, not in tomorrow, is the heart. In the centre of consciousness, in the centre of mind is the always alive spiritual heart. It has for us purpose, meaning, and calling. Amid distraction, hurt, and fear we can (if we want to) learn to steadily hear it. In the hearing, there is the following.

We cover consciousness and the heart with too much thinking. Too much imagining, reflecting, assessing – all this and more can keep attention from being in touch with the deeper wisdom of the heart. We then forget how to hear the heart, or if we do, the hearing can often be fleeting – like an echo of the sound of something loving and familiar.

Healthy spiritual paths will have practical ways to guide us into the hearing of our hearts. If all we get are ‘mother statements’ – listen to your heart, follow your dreams – with no practical ways, then hope becomes strained and frustration can rise because the path has become ethereal.

Long standing spiritualities and religions do have practical ways to the heart. One such practical way is meditation. How can meditation help? By giving attention to a word or phrase, for at least 20 minutes a day morning and evening, there will be an effect. Regular practice of this way will see the mind, over time, quieten. As thoughts and imaginings soften, there will be more space for feelings to rise and fall, heal and integrate. Thinking will become something that happens more appropriately and less often. In the space now within, a space once occupied by too much thinking and emotional disorder, the heart moves into awareness.

As we become aware, we experience the heart’s drawing and longing. In time and with guidance we can come to understand that certain people, places, and things draw our hearts and cause them to long. The practical ways in which we follow this drawing and longing become our way of purpose, of meaning and calling.

Life can be more than ‘wake work drink sleep retire’.

 

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May 7, 2016

Lazarus: David Bowie. In Death We Become Alive

By Andrew

This is part two of our David Bowie feature.

The Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus was written, like all the Gospels were, through the prism of the human experience of Jesus risen from the dead. After Jesus’ death those who were close to him during his earthly life experienced him as alive to them in a powerful and deeply intimate way. Free from the limits of physicality, Jesus exploded into their hearts – that place of pure experience at the centre of us where we and divinity are one, communing in spirit. The Gospels were written after this experience and during it.

What the story of Lazarus tells us is that death has no hold on life; that life is of such a force and nature that nothing can contain it. Life is of the spirit and life embodies (enlivens) all physicality. Death is a material reality, not ultimate Reality.

“Look up here, I’m in heaven.” The Lazarus that is David Bowie is now no longer limited by the physical. The scars of a human life and the drama of ‘below’ that were his have now been transcended. In this transcending, this going beyond, Bowie bursts into the fullness of life, a life that is in everything and everyone.

In the Gospel story eternal life courses into the dead Lazarus revealing to us that we will emerge into eternal life after death. This eternal life can be experienced here and now as it heals and transforms our human lives.

“I’ve got nothing left to lose…Dropped my cell phone down below.” As Bowie sings these words he floats between worlds. It seems that only his bed clothes are preventing him from floating away. Perhaps his experience of death is shedding him of what is ultimately unimportant: such things as opinions and judgements, our fears and anxieties, notions of success and failure, pride and competition, and all those things in our personalities that would stop us from living in the fullness of life already given to us. The cell phone is dropped – attachment to temporal intrigues and involvements is gone.

He asked, “Where have you laid him?” They replied, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. Thus the people who had come to mourn said, “Look how much he loved him!” But some of them said, “This is the man who caused the blind man to see! Couldn’t he have done something to keep Lazarus from dying?” Jesus, intensely moved again, came to the tomb. (Now it was a cave, and a stone was placed across it.) Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the deceased, replied, “Lord, by this time the body will have a bad smell, because he has been buried four days.” Jesus responded, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believe, you would see the glory of God?”  So they took away the stone. Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you that you have listened to me. I knew that you always listen to me, but I said this for the sake of the crowd standing around here, that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he shouted in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The one who had died came out, his feet and hands tied up with strips of cloth, and a cloth wrapped around his face. Jesus said to them, “Unwrap him and let him go.” (John 11:34-44)

Jesus was close to Lazarus, he loved him. We can see this as Jesus weeps and is “intensely moved”. In raising Lazarus Jesus shows us that our relationships also transcend death. The depth of closeness with someone experienced on earth can continue after their death. And not only this: the closeness can deepen. Those tensions of character and personality that may have come between us and our loved ones are no more. Our ego has nothing to rub against. All that is left is the truth of who our loved ones are. At our depths and in Truth this truth is free to commune with the truth of who we are. There is no fear in Truth.

During meditation we practice attention off the ego. As we deepen in this practice we encounter and live into the truth of who we are and the truth of life.

The gift of this song and video from David Bowie could be seen as a participation in the spiritual reality of communion at the heart of relationship. Bowie lives on not only in his music, but in the relationship that his music fosters between us and him and especially in the relationship he has with those who were closest to him. Just like those Bluebirds he is free, free to be in the freedom given to us all; free from fear and free to be.

The cupboard in this video is the tomb of the Lazarus story. But who is it that comes out of the cupboard at the beginning of this video; that reaches out from under the bed enabling Bowie to float; hiding under the desk, touching and empowering him in his final moments? His muse; an angel; an embodiment of the Divine; a variation on the Grim Reaper? And what is Bowie writing? Is creativity bursting from him in his final moments?

Later, as Bowie dances and sings in front of his ‘tomb cupboard’ we can see the bandages of Lazarus in the white lines on Bowie’s black clothing. The final scene seems to have Bowie doing a ‘Lazarus in reverse’. While the Gospel Lazarus comes back to earthly life from death, Bowie seems to reverse into death from earthly life. His entry into the ‘tomb cupboard’ is a reverse replay of a ‘tomb cupboard’ exiting. He exits and enters the tomb at the same time. Death and life, at least on this earthly plane, are a part of each other. And if we can embrace death, be unafraid of it, we discover in our hearts that death is the way to into life, both temporal and eternal. Christians call this ‘dying and rising in Christ’.

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January 25, 2016

Changes: David Bowie. Change as Growth into Self-Expression

By Andrew

In this early song from David Bowie (1971, and performed here around 2002) there is restlessness, not for fame and riches, more a restlessness for purpose and expression. For this to happen, Bowie accepts that there needs to be some changes, that he’s “Just gonna have to be a different man.” What is around him, what he has done so far, who he is so far, all this is not as sweet as expected. Expectations about life and living have not yet been satisfied.

“So I turned myself to face me.” At such times of restlessness we can turn to questions about who we are. What we do and what we strive for can, after all, be a reflection of what we value and who we are. If what we are doing and valuing is not good enough to satisfy, what does this say about the person we are? What does it say about the person we want to become?

The ‘not enough’ of life can draw us into honesty. Honesty, however, must be practiced. It seems that Bowie has been practicing something else. He is struggling to catch a glimpse of “the faker” he assumes others are seeing. He knows that he wants to be different, somehow a better man, and yet he also seems to be caught in a role that he has, up to this point, been performing.

If we don’t know enough of who we are we can become lost in the roles we perform, whether these roles are on stage, at work, in our relationships, in our homes. We can come to identify ourselves with what we do rather than with who we more deeply are. When this happens, in our more lucid moments, we may catch ourselves in our own pretending and ask the question “who am I?”

Perhaps Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke of later years were all a part of the search for identity and true expression that this song seems to allude to.

Our true or deeper self is not someone we can think up, or create with a role. This self is already fully given and cannot be fashioned with imagined definition. It is through the experience of this self that we can grow in awareness of it and become stable in it. As this awareness and stability grows, our roles can instead become ways of expressing self. With the existential pressure off, we can then relax into our roles in life.

Our roles are temporary, merely a part of the “stream of warm impermanence”. It is the deeper self that gives them life and energy. Healthy and regular spiritual practice helps us to keep our attention on this self so that we do not forget it and get lost in roles. Attention on self helps us to both experience and express self.

Keeping our attention on self is the contemplative necessity at the heart of any true self-expression. Regular meditation is the practice of ongoing attention on this self. In meditation we experience and stabilise in ourselves. We can then take this experience and stability into our roles and self-express through them.

As we experience ourselves in meditation we also experience ourselves becoming infused with divine life. Why is this? It is because self experience and divine experience are of a union. Attention on self is attention on God.

With this infusion God can be in our human changing helping us to be true to who we are: unique images of divine love. Self is this image of divinity within us. God simply wants our whole humanity to be consistent with who we most deeply are; at our deepest, so do we.

“Changes are taking the pace I’m going through.” The pace of change is an experience and a rhythm of life that we cannot control. Fear of living wants to control change because to change is to live. This fear wants us to opt out of anything that might cause change. To follow this fear is a decision against the inevitability of change. Rather than live life, we live death because we refuse to live the change that life is.

As we grow in a choice for life, we learn that if we are to experience the richness of life and self we must allow the changing circumstances of life to change us. Within this allowing of change divine love can work for the good of us and the world.

The divine life, as energy for life and change, acts in our choices for life, helping us to act courageously and truly. Implicitly or explicitly, whether we are aware of it or not, divinity in life is always moving in support of our choices for life and change.

But what is it, who is it, that we consult about life and change? What were we taught? Were we told that we must leave childhood behind if we are to grow and live? Why is it, then, that spiritual masters like Jesus invite us to become like little children? The innocence of childhood never leaves us. We bury it. Spiritual practice and human healing is about integrating this original innocence into the living of life. As children, before the trauma of life set in, we lived naturally as ourselves.

A tragedy of life is that we have forgotten this ‘original innocence’. Sometimes it is in the experience of the strange – the ‘stranger’ and the ‘strange events’ of life – that we remember our forgotten selves, forgotten selves that may themselves seem strange.

In turning to “face the strange” within himself and life, Bowie modelled for us the courage needed to discover, re-member, and express ourselves.

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October 3, 2015

Third Eye: Florence & the Machine. Seeing and Living Truly

By Andrew

Humanity could be described as ‘embodied spirits’. Both of these words are as important as each other. We are embodied, incarnated. The stuff of life is valuable and sacred. Florence affirms this when she sings: ‘You are flesh and blood!’ And we also have in our mysterious depths that essence of us, that who we are at our deepest; our point of Originality in and with the divine life – our spirit. Is this what Florence appeals to (perhaps unknowingly) when she sings ‘Hey, look up!’ ?

Living truly, from spirit, helps us to see and live in the embodied sacredness of life. This means living relationally – with ourselves, others, creation, and the God within all.

For me this song is about the struggle to live truly, from this spirit as a whole human being. This spirit within us is our ‘original lifeline’. The mysterious spirit within is our Point of Truth, an always present Home to which we can return and, with practice, live life from. It is the ‘where within’ that prayer can help us be attentive to. It is where our spirit and the Divine Spirit are already one.

Our ‘third eye’ could be described as that mysterious intuitive perception that both includes and goes beyond the rational. It is a divine gift that originates from our oneness in spirit with the Divine Life. It is human intuition infused with divine wisdom. This song asks us to grow in seeing ourselves as our third eye sees us.

This third eye is appealing to that which Divinity has not created: the lies of worthlessness we have absorbed into the marrow of our bones; the deep memories and psychic wounds that get in the way of us accepting and living in the glory that we already are. We get caught, trapped, in the lies of a real unreality.

We are loved, deeply and completely. No lie can stop this, but a lie can stop our experience of it. This is the power we give to lies.

It is the ‘original tragedy’ of human relating that we are not more expressive of our fully loved and loving roots.

Our third eye sees into the original tragedy of our woundedness – that hole in our hearts where lies fester. Part of healing and integration is allowing this third eyesight into our awareness. Yes, our conscious selves can pull away from what our third eye sees. Yet, with time and living, this deeper intuition can become irrepressible. In this song Florence is chronicling some of her own irrepressible journey towards wholeness.

As the experience of our wounds moves into awareness suffering grows. Some of us actually cling to this suffering, allowing it to define them. Rather than the experience of suffering being a part of healing it becomes a meaning for living. Rather than have love embrace us, the pain of suffering can be worn like a mantle – that piece of experience we clothe ourselves with to keep life, love, and intimacy away. The lie that we simply do not deserve what we already have and are can be stubborn and strong – we make it so. While wearing this mantle, we can reject the people and experiences of life that are inconsistent with the lies we live and believe.

But your pain is a tribute
The only thing you let hold you
Wear it now like a mantle
Always there to remind you

Where is the way out of all this? We can feel the same, like nothing is changing. Something in us doesn’t want to change. And yet, still we try to change as if something in us does want to change.

The true and the loving in us embraces change. To grow in the spirit is to change. We change into who we most deeply are. This change is what we are here for – to become in our whole humanity who we already are in spirit: a unique, glorious, and beautiful life of love. This reality, once touched, once experienced, is too enticing to be ignored.

The contemplative life is a human life enticed by the spirit, a life drawn into becoming true love on earth. Only God can make this happen. It does involve struggle. It is a struggle that grows into the ‘slow burn’ joy that only divinity can fuel.

Prayer in touch with our contemplative and human roots is prayer at the service of our growth into love. This kind of prayer is deep and therapeutic. It is prayer as therapy for the soul.

Meditation is one form of this deep prayer. Attention on the mantra gives divinity within us the time and space needed to heal and integrate the whole of us. As this happens we may need to name and experience thoughts, emotions, and memories that our consciousness has (up to that point) repressed. At these times it is useful to have someone wise to journey with.

Meditation guides attention towards our spirit and its third eye. A fruit of regular meditation practice is an inner life more and more attentive to this third eye, this deep human and divine intuition within us. As we heal and integrate we grow in being able to see a little more clearly with this eye ourselves, and the people and the happenings around us. This seeing is divine gift that happens as we grow in self forgetting.

Christian spirituality describes this self-forgetting seeing with the third eye as having the mind of Christ.

The spiritual person, on the other hand, can assess the value of everything, and that person’s value cannot be assessed by anyone else. For: who has ever known the mind of the Lord? Who has ever been his advisor? But we are those who have the mind of Christ. (1Cor2:14-16)

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June 12, 2015

Dithering: Ani DiFranco. Attention to Being as a Cure for Over Thinking

By Andrew

Knowledge gives us meaning. In our search for meaning many of us want know all about the many things and the many stories around us. This can be an important part of life, whether it be important to our work, lifestyle, temperament, compulsions.

The assumption has been that a rational approach is the best way to know and the best way to find the meaning in life. Our system of education is still very much based on the development and exercise of the rational in the pursuit of knowledge. And so we classify and name, gathering more and more information.

When the experience of a groundedness in our own being takes second place to living life rationally we risk rationality becoming the only way to find meaning and reason for existence. Without the balancing of an experience of our common humanity in being, rational pursuits can become overburdened and judgmental.

The journey from gathering and naming, to assuming and then to judging is a short one. We can all too easily and without being aware of it fall into judging people and circumstance with the limited information we have found (or have been given).

As we find meaning in this limited information we have we begin to feel secure and assured. Insecurity is offset by judgment. If we are not careful judgement of difference can become the focus of fear. This is how racism and xenophobia are born.

Fundamental meaning is found in the experience of our common humanity in being. Our rationality is meant to serve and name this experience, not take the place of it. We need being and rationality working in context and accord.

We now live in a world in which the ways many gather information are being tailor-made to their ideas and assumptions. A Google search will factor in your search history and show you results that are consistent with this history. Facebook will put on your news feed subject matter that is similar to you and your friends likes.

There is more the expectation today that research will be done for us and presented to us ‘efficiently’. This research is telling us that attention spans are getting shorter. As a result, the intelligence of many, it seems, (that very intelligence we have a rational tendency to over rely on) is being ‘dumbed down’.

An excessively rational approach views the mind as akin to a computer data base and limits the mind to the brain (existing only “behind the face”). I had a spiritual mentor once point to the palm of his hand and say “this is my mind”. It was his way of saying that the mind is an embodied reality and experience. Emotions are in the mind and are felt in the body. Thinking is done in the brain. The whole of the body in its feeling and thinking is the mind and the whole of the mind is the body.

If our attention is trained to focus excessively on just one part of the mind – the brain – then it is understandable that we feel the strain of this. Information comes to classify us rather than simply inform us. We come to define ourselves via what we think and how we think. Knowledge is reduced to information “in rotation”. With this idea of knowledge, an idea divorced from the experience and wisdom of being, we attempt to answer life questions independent of this experience of being. The result is dithering. People can become uncertain, indecisive, and agitated.

Meditation focuses attention on our whole being, not just on the mind as ‘brain thinking’. As the experience of being grows in us our idea of mind is transformed. At depth, mind and being are the same experience.

As we practice this attention on being, day after day, the experience becomes one of God within us and all. Our experience of being changes our idea of mind and then loses us in the Being of God. We grow in seeing as God sees and experiencing life as God experiences life: all is one in love. Compassion grows and gently replaces judgement.

We have to begin somewhere. We have to begin with ourselves and by learning to be silent with ourselves. This means simply learning to be, to be ourselves, rather than defining ourselves by what we do or what we think. As an art and a practice, meditation brings us towards this state of simple being through the still, silent repetition of the mantra. (John Main, Word Made Flesh, 8).

This is all we need do: simply and faithfully give and re-give attention to the mantra. All else has been given and awaits our discovery.

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January 28, 2015

Small Things: Ben Howard. Madness and Plain Sight

By Andrew

Sometimes we can’t see what is in plain sight. The small concerns of life, the little worries; the daily round of cares: all can gather round us claiming attention. Soon our emotional lives are caught up in this disturbance and distraction. Whether it’s thought or emotion, all is energy. We are always energy in form and in motion.

When these words, images, and emotions make a home in our minds, the meanings they carry begin to affect how we see things and how we relate to people. ‘Has the world gone mad…Is it all so very bad…Or is it me?’

There seems to be no reprieve from a way of seeing that becomes our way of seeing. We soak in it. We identify with it. It seems we can’t change it. It has become just the way we are and the way it is.

It becomes more and more difficult to ‘keep the peace’, to be at peace. Any promise or demand of peace, be it within us or around us, is trivial. The reality of peace slips away, forgotten and unattainable.

In these times we cannot see the love that lives in plain sight. In times of kaleidoscope and whirl, of these small things gathering and fusing, we cannot see it. The experience can be one of love absent – a hole inside that cannot be filled. Love is veiled, hidden behind the small things.

Being so out of touch with the Reality of Love and so identified with thought and emotion – this is a kind of madness.

There is a way out of this madness. We can practice a refocusing, a retraining of attention away from the kaleidoscopic of internal existence that Ben Howard is singing about here. It is a refocusing, a retraining. And it is so much more than this. It is also a way of loving transformation: the transformation of the mind from disintegrating to integrating. On the inner journey towards this integration there is peace.

The contemplative way is a way of this transformation. The transformation is done by this Love, the divine love life within us. We co-operate with this love life as it transforms us.

If we are to co-operate, the way into contemplation must be practical, it must be a practice. Meditation is one such practical and contemplative way. A mantra based meditative practice asks of us something very simple. It invites us to choose a word to give our attention to. The practice of giving and re-giving our inner attention to this word, over time, allows Love to work at loosening our attachments, our identification, with the ‘small things’ of thought and emotion.

The word maranatha is one such word we can use. Recite it, internally, gently and faithfully, as four syllables: ma-ra-na-tha. Have a straight back and a still body as you meditate. When you find attention no longer on the word, gently re-give it, again and again, until the time of meditation is finished: see if you can do 20 minutes.

You keep him [sic] in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock. (Isaiah26:12)

This is the long-term fruit of a regular meditation practice: our mind is stayed on the God who is Love. Our mind settles into the deep stability of the divine life. Awareness stays there. The kaleidoscope ceases to turn in the mad way of before. Our minds may still be at times buffeted and blown, however, during these times we can actually experience a new reality of ‘I am not my thoughts; I am not my emotions’.

Attention becomes grounded in the deep life of being and being is grounded in God.

The regularity of our practice grows as it slowly dawns on us just how transformative, how important to sane living a practice like meditation is. The choice is ours.

A contemplative practice unveils the God who is always there – in plain sight. It is our inattentiveness that often causes us to experience God as absent.

I have been telling you these things in veiled language. The hour is coming when I shall no longer speak to you in veiled language but tell you about the Father in plain words. (John16:25).

The ‘hour’ of contemplation and the contemplative life, are about the absence of veils. It is plain living, simple living, true living. As the veils fall, as the small things subside, the presence of God becomes vivid, the language clearer. As our minds transform, so do our lives.

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November 28, 2014

Offer it Up: Kate Miller-Heidke. The Yes to Life and Living

By Andrew

I once saw a great definition for spirituality. The person giving the definition clenched his fist, bent his arm at the elbow, and quickly thrust his elbow down to his side. As he did this he shouted YES! Fantasic. Spirituality is about growing in the embrace of life and doing those things in life that are a YES to life, those things that give us (in return) the gift of being alive in and to life.

Spirituality is also about the gentle art of participating in the transformation of those things within us that can get in the way of this YES, that get in the way of living a life. As we move past these things we experience the life in life and leave behind the experience of life as a living death.

In this YES definition spirituality has some commonality with psychology in that both can be about the fostering and development of human lives for life. The modern expression of psychology, however, has no space for the divine explicity within its paradigm. This can be a problem because, as spiritual and created beings, we need the divine to be our transforming agent. Christian spirituality teaches us that we can only participate in our own transformation (or salvation) and not be it ourselves. Spirituality, however, does include the psychological.

Christian spirituality names this pattern of transformation as dying to what stops us from living and rising to what gives us life. Broadly speaking, it is a dying to fear and a rising to love. This fear/love dynamic is one which any authentic spirituality addresses in its own way.

The Christian writer and mystic Thomas Merton called this pattern of dying and rising the Paschal Rhythm of Life. The word paschal has roots in the Hebrew pesah, the Greek pascha, and the Aramaic pasha. It means, broadly, ‘pass over’. We pass over from death to life. For Christians the word is associated with Easter and the dying and rising of Jesus, the ‘Paschal Mystery.’ As ‘Easter People’ alive to this paschal event and rhythm, Christians are invited to enter the lifelong dynamic of rising to the reality of love and dying to the illusion of fear. We do this in and with the divine life which we experience and name as uncreated and unconditional (divine) love.

This song from Kate Miller-Heidke is all about the decision to move from death to life, to commit to the YES of life and living. In this sense the song is deeply spiritual. It’s all about the “WOO-HOO” factor of living – saying YES to life.

Kate Miller-Heidke offers her whole life to this movement from death to life: “my heart, my brain, my body, my hands, my voice, my blood, my lungs, my love.” She decides to ‘offer it up.’ She offers her life to the dynamic of life, the energy of life, the event of life. She wants in. She wants to be more in, to have that deep sense of purpose and fulfillment that comes from a deep connection to, and participation in, life.

Finally she is sick enough of what, for her, blocks life: fearful decisions of turning down life’s opportunities; holding in the verve and energy of life for fear of the consequences; tiptoeing ’round fearing the response of others to her existence. The lines of energy and communication are growing open. The unique transmissions, or expressions, of her being are happening with growing occurrence. She’s turning it up.

Turning it up doesn’t have to be a big thing. The smaller the better, in fact. A smile to a stranger; a small and new expression of love for a loved one; a small and ordinary way of loving ourselves that starts to grow in regularity. Life happens mostly in the ‘small stuff’. We no longer need to ‘look for signs’ – we gently become an expression of the reality we are seeking.

All the big accomplishments of life have their origins in the small of life. The trick is to stay in the present moment of the small things to express and experience life there.

Although Kate-Miller Heidke doesn’t mention the divine, and perhaps she doesn’t believe in the existence of the divine, it does seem to me that she is experiencing something of what a theist would name as the effect of the divine. The divine in life joins with our restlessness, our being sick enough of not living. The divine in life is the energy of life that propels us into the decision to live; and it is the agent of the transformation itself. Divinity is so close to us and our decisions for life that the naming of this divinity in the decisions of life need not be necessary. We are a humanity created by this Divine Love. As a result, uncreated Love is in all things by default, including us and our decisions for life. Anonymous divinity seems happy enough to work for the life of all. What is important, however, is that we let go and allow this anonymous divinity to do the transforming. Often the letting go happens mysteriously in the ‘sick enough’ experience.

The naming of this divine Love and growing in relationship with it can help us, though. The great spiritual traditions teach that we will always have a restlessness for that mysterious something ‘more’, no matter how much we connect with life. That more is the divine. We are made to live into conscious communion with this divine life. Naming this divinity is part of the movement into conscious communion. The deep living into life is part of the journey of living into the divine life of Love.

A contemplative prayer practice, one such as Christian meditation, is the training of our attention into this mysterious transformative dynamic at the heart of us and of all life. With regular practice we are changed, transformed. We move, in very practical ways, from living death to living life. And we grow in a humanity that lives more and more from the divine communion deep in us. We live more and more into our origins. We uniquely become love because we are created and loved by Divine Love. Whether we know it or not, this becoming love, this conscious growing into Love’s communion, this is our heart’s greatest desire.

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