Spiritual Bliss

I used to think that spiritual living would free us from the burdens of this life. That the spiritual life is like the Ecstasy of St. Teresa. Spiritual bliss in joyous harmony with the Lord. Not so much… It more like rawness to my emotions at times. It’s the self awareness of my own brokenness mixed with my external selfishness and the constant need for God’s grace and guidance just to get through the day.

It’s the openness of my emotions to myself that makes daily living difficult. There are times when the wish for sedation overwhelms me and daily living is a chore. These are also the days when I learn to spread my arms wide and release myself into the emptiness and blackness of God’s embrace.

It’s not the fall that kills me, it’s the impact, so I’ve heard. Then I need to trust that the impact is not a concrete floor but the tenderness of God’s heart that I will fall into. His love that will keep me there safely in Him.

My most recent raw moment was at work when I sat in front of an entryway to a meeting that I wasn’t invited to. I had to sit and watch as everyone—whom I felt at the moment more welcomed and deserving—walked into the room to be together and I was excluded.

I felt rejected and small.

As more people piled into the small meeting room and more chairs were pulled in to accommodate them, I felt the inside of my heart squeeze out all the blood it held, leaving me breathless, empty and pathetic.

The thoughts that went through my mind started off with vanity and pride. First: I don’t need them and I don’t need the information being shared. It doesn’t pertain to my job. Then spiraled down to: I’m always treated like a step child even by my own family. Finally: I don’t need anyone, I can do quite well all by myself.

Why did I feel hurt? I forced myself to sit in my seat, to focus and finished my task when every part of my being wanted to flee into a corner somewhere where I’d feel safe. I knew I needed to open myself to what God wanted to teach me.

I wanted a distraction. Something to flee from this internal turmoil of emotion where I can feel the darkness overcoming me as the seconds tick by. Alas, I vowed not to leave my seat. I only had a cup of coffee and my work computer with me so my options were limited. If only I had my phone with me and I could check my email or send a text to my husband who I know will respond right a way. I would feel some affirmation of my self-worth if I received a response. But what if he can’t respond? What then?

It was a moment of a void and it was a moment that I knew God wanted me to learn something. The hurt I felt was not pain inflicted by anyone in that room, nor the person that didn’t send me the invite. The hurt came solely from the narrative that I tell myself and my experiences with the world.

Pride prevented me from picking myself up from that chair, walking into the room and taking a seat. No one would have kicked me out. It did cross my mind, but I was too deep in wallowing in my anger and slowly drowning before I realized I could float. I was afraid that someone was going to do a roll call like they did in school, find out that I’m in the wrong classroom and kick me out.

I once stood in the back of my first day of band class by myself after all my classmates took a seat in their preferred instrument section. I wanted to play violin and was waiting for the teach to call the violin section. He sat me with the clarinets.

This exercise, although it sounds self-defeating, was actually freeing when I entered into the deepest part of my sorrow and saw my own selfish reactions. Who am I to demand inclusion and a throne to sit on? God came to serve. He humbled himself as a infant and put his trust in a teenage girl. He washed twelve pair of very sticky, hairy and yellow toed feet before being nailed to the cross, so I can sit here in my selfishness and find His love and grace in my life.

That is what I do during contemplation. I wake up every morning and choose to let myself die to its selfishness so I can live in God’s loving embrace. Some days I fair better than others. Some days I want to crawl back into bed and wallow in the sorrow of my disconnected life and mourn the loss of not being with Him.

Daily prayer and contemplation opens myself to His love and I lets him show me both my wickedness and my beauty. I learn to accept both as the condition of my existence. I pick of the cross of my brokenness to abide in Him. To look forward to the redemption of the world and to His eternal salvation.

I leave you with an excerpt from Jacques Philippe’s, Interior Freedom.

Badness isn’t all bad: The positive side of difficulties

We also have to admit that difficulties, however hard they may be, bring not only disadvantages but also advantages. The first advantage is that they prevent us from assuming exclusive ownership of our lives and our time. They prevent us from shutting ourselves up inside our programs, our plans, our wisdom. They liberate us from the prison of ourselves: our narrow-mindedness and narrowness of judgment. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts, says the Lord.” The worst thing that could happen would be for everything to go exactly as we wanted it, for that would be the end of any growth. To be able to enter little by little into God’s wisdom, infinitely more beautiful, richer, more fruitful, and more merciful than ours, our human wisdom needs a very thorough shake-up. Not to destroy it, but to raise and purify it, and free it from its limitations. It is always marked by a certain measure of selfishness and pride, and by a lack of faith and love. Our narrow vision needs opening up to God’s wisdom; we require an in-depth renewal. Sin, by its nature, is narrowing—holiness is openness of spirit and greatness of soul.

Image: Edgar Degar, Madame Théodore Gobillard, née Yves Morisot. 1986. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, NY.