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
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Recommended Reading
The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus
While Shakespeare and Donne would inevitably have had in mind the political and religious upheavals of the age, it is surely something far greater than that, a different sort of power game, that they have intuited. They lament the loss of the relation of part to whole, of individual to community, of the context, the cosmos, to which each single soul belongs – each now standing alone. There is a loss of harmony (‘each thing meets in mere oppugnancy’, in Ulysses’ phrase), the whole has become a heap of bits and pieces (‘crumbled out again to its atoms’). And, as Ulysses reminds us, this can have only one ending:
Then every thing include itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, an universal wolf
(So doubly seconded with will and power),
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
Iain McGilchrist in his book on the brain, The Master and HIs Emissary
As we traverse this life in the context of the Information Age, we have an inherent tendency to reduce what we experience into facts and figures that can be analyzed. This quality of attention is second nature. To reduce everything into its smallest component parts seems normal to us. After all, our end goal is to understand. And our understanding of understanding is that gathering more and more information is the best method of pursuit.
And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, our end goal is deeper than mere understanding. Our end goal is to understand in order to take advantage. Information is currency, and with it we may purchase that which benefits us.
And yet, as McGilchrist and Shakespeare and Ulysses and the core of our own souls would observe, such a pursuit cannot help but see everything and everyone as utilitarian. Nature becomes a heap of resources to exploit. People become a grid of traits and resources with which to judge as useful, irrelevant, or in need of cancellation.
This reductionist mindset, this reduced quality of attention, has infiltrated not just society at large, but, in a bit of irony, all of its component parts – including the church. The Church, as we will see in today’s episode, is called to a much higher quality of attention. One that sees Nature as the glory of God and people as his image-bearers, even the least of all people as Jesus himself.
Today we will review the last six episodes of Awestruck and how each of their individual themes collectively make the whole message we marvel at today more than just the sum of its parts.
The time has come for the Church – for all followers of Jesus – to lay down our weapons of mass reduction and return to living lives of wonder, reverence, and love for all.
Source Scripture
Through the Roof: Matthew 9:1-8; Mark 2:1-12; Luke 5:17-26
Party Time: Matthew 9:9-13; Mark 2:13-17; Luke 5:27-32
I Have a Proposal Matthew 9:14-17; Mark 2:18-22; Luke 5:33-39
Everyone Out of the Pool: John 5:1-16
Good Work! John 5:17-18
You Look Marvelous: John 5:19-30
All That is Required: Micah 6:8
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras