The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a man’s life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul. Thomas Merton
Acceptance – we yearn for it in our inmost being. We long for others to accept us as we are, and yet we are terrified that who we are – which includes our shortcomings, our fears, our secret stories of horror, the terrible things we have thought and done – will repel others and deny us the very acceptance we seek.
And so we don costumes, adapting some role that isn’t us, hoping to finally earn acceptance. But is it really acceptance if we gain it as someone other than our true self?
Maintaining the false self requires exerting so much effort that we then collapse when in solitude and wonder why we feel so empty, lonely, and starved for the very thing we created the false self in the first place – acceptance.
Your deepest desires for acceptance cannot and will not be met until your true self can safely and wholly emerge in full view of another that has an enthusiastic willingness to approach, to touch, to wipe away tears, to gently clean away all impurities to reveal the beauty that lies beneath – you.
When your desire for acceptance, free of costume, meets and grasps the divine desire to accept you for who you really are – you have reached the most sacred space on all earth – the axis mundi – where heaven meets earth. Where the divine meets – and embraces – you.
Source Scripture
Matthew 8:1-4; Mark 1:40-45; Luke 5:12-16
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
(Apple I Spotify)
Recommended Reading
The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus
Woe to him who cannot tell the difference between the fear of objective truth—a truth which exposes us to our lies in order to show us the fundamental love at the heart of reality—and the fear of the false universe which our world injects into us. Jacob Needleman
Gravity is an objective reality – it exists whether we are conscious of it or not. And gravity not only exists. It exerts. Its force acts upon us at all times. And as such, we construct our world in order to accommodate it – even when we aren’t conscious of it. At crucial times, to not have a keen awareness of the presence and power of gravity is to risk harm or death.
It is one thing to read in a book that the gravitational force exerted on a free-falling body results in an acceleration of that body of 9.8 m/s/s. It is quite another to thing to lose your footing on the precipice of a steep cliff and realize that if you don’t regain your balance immediately, you will be that free-falling body.
Our modern way of thinking has created a false dichotomy between truth and experience. We have become obsessed with the reduction of truth into facts: atomic sentences and numbers and equations that we can use as a periodic table of elements.
But this obsession holds no real power. No matter how well you know that two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen combine to form water, this fact will not help you when you are on your knees in the desert and dying of thirst.
Water is life, and your experience of consuming it is vital.
Spiritual truths exemplify this need for active participation even more deeply. A sacred text is not sacred because it reveals truth in written form. It is sacred when and only when the truth in the text connects the spirits of both reader and writer and the experience of sacred communion takes place.
Facts stripped of truth and immersive experience are lifeless at best and oppressive at worst. But when spirit meets truth – yours and the divine – you lose your mind and find your soul.
So if you’re stuck in your head and dying of thirst in a land of facts, it’s time to strike out on a new adventure.
Source Scripture
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
For Meditation
“The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of joy.” Psalms 65:8 NIV