Pilgrimage of a Soul (eBook)

Introduction

Darkness. If you’ve experienced it, you know what I’m talking about. Darkness sets in long before we’re old enough to recognize it. It begins with anguish. We’ve been hurt, sometimes tragically, and we don’t know what to do with that injury. The safest thing seems to be to hide the pain, perhaps behind a mask. We seek to be safe by any means necessary. We learn to cope. And we achieve for ourselves a form of love, security or power that the wounded part of us desperately needs. But these coping mechanisms rob us of fullness of life. To really thrive in life, our soul needs to be transformed—over and over again. This is the work of the spiritual journey. Exercising the courage to embark on the journey postures us for radical transformation.

Many of you who are reading this book are probably persons of faith. You may feel as if you’ve been on the spiritual journey for quite a long time. But the spiritual journey is subtly different from our faith conversion. According to Father Thomas Keating—a Cistercian monk—at the time of conversion we orient our lives by the question, “What can I do for God?”1 Seems appropriate, right? But when we begin the spiritual journey our life is dramatically altered toward the question, “What can God do for me?” This isn’t a narcissistic, exploitative question toward a disempowered God. It’s the exact opposite. This is the central question of a humble person who has awakened to their true self and to the awe-inspiring adoration of an extraordinary God.2

One of the things we desperately need God to do for us is to transform us from what we are today into what God intends us to be. In a world where leaders of nations are making war and preparing to defend their sovereignty by proliferating nuclear bombs, where religious fundamentalists kill innocents under the guise of righteousness, and where the average American citizen contributes daily to the destruction of our ecosphere, it is clear that we are a people in need of transformation. All of us are subject to self-deception. We commit evil and call it good. We commit violence and call it social justice.

Like the blind man Bartimaeus, when we awaken to the reality of our desperate condition we can hear Jesus asking us, “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:46-52). If we surrender and cry out, “Jesus, have mercy on me!” we have begun the spiritual journey.

Whether or not we’ve realized it in the depths of our being, we are people who need to ask what God can do for us. You are a person who needs to ask God, “What can you do for me?” The spiritual journey invites us into the process of radical transformation, and nothing prepares us as adequately for transformation as Christian contemplation.

The Christian contemplative tradition navigates our path toward a posture of receptivity to the One who can save us from our chaos and destruction—whether that is on a small, personal and social scale or on the grand landscape of global politics. All we have to do is submit to the process. That’s it. Submit. Surrender. Dare to approach God with humble adoration. But since the beginning of time, it seems that surrender is the most difficult of postures for humanity. We much prefer self-sufficiency and self-righteousness. In our attempt to “fix” ourselves, we prefer to order, direct and define our own spirituality. In contrast, contemplative spirituality carves the posture of surrender into the fabric of our being, making us most receptive to the transformation that we cannot obtain for ourselves.

This book illuminates how I stumbled into the Christian contemplative tradition and how contemplative prayer facilitated and supported a personal awakening. In these pages I attempt to map this part of my spiritual journey against the metaphor of pilgrimage, drawing narrative from an actual pilgrimage I made in Spain. Through the vulnerability of the unfolding story, this book attempts to illuminate contemplative spirituality for the active life. The “active life” is the life all of us live. We are made to work, play and be in relationship—all very concrete ways of active living. The active life is the life fully engaged and interacting with the world. But to define what is meant by “contemplative” threatens to obliterate the essence of the concept. If we approach the meaning of the contemplative life cerebrally, with the need to analyze, dissect and define, we have missed the gift altogether. The starting place for the contemplative life is surrender. We let go of being in control. We are rendered powerless. To be contemplative is a state of being, a posture more than something concrete of which to grab hold. Even the greatest of mystics tend to use elusive language to describe the contemplative life. Contemplative spirituality is experiential and intuitive. But that doesn’t mean it is only for certain personality types. Contemplative spirituality is the portal to the direct life-giving presence of God. When rooted in contemplative spirituality we are more receptive and supple in the hands of God; the life of Christ flows more freely through us.

Rather than dichotomize the active life from the contemplative life—as if it were adequate to choose to live one way or another—the abundant life brings balance or union to the active and contemplative dimensions of life. If we consider the wheel as a symbol for life, contemplation will be found in the centermost axis and the active life extends out in the spokes, as all the while the wheel is turning, progressing forward.3 But without the center axis, the spokes lose their anchor and are unable to support the forward motion of the wheel. Without the spokes, the center axis is deemed irrelevant. When we are least connected to our contemplative center, our life is most tense and chaotic. When rooted in contemplative spirituality, the active life reflects greater peace, purpose and effectiveness.

Over the years, the following practices have supported the contemplative dimension of my life:

• “Phileena Fridays”—At first I made time and space for contemplation through rest, reflection and recreation one day per week.
• Private retreats—“Phileena Fridays” morphed into regular private retreats lasting a couple of days, four times per year, when I would force myself to be alone with self and God. I was free from the external demands of others and could battle out the internal ones.
• Sabbath—Honoring a weekly sabbath by committing to do only that which rests and nurtures my soul and is a gift of self offered back to God.4
• Contemplative prayer—Regular centering prayer (a minimum of two twenty-minute silent prayer periods per day). Consenting to the action of God within me through centering prayer leaves no room for hiding. When we willingly abandon ourselves to God, God calls out to our deepest self and dismantles our illusions. The true self grows in knowledge, awareness and courage.5

For nearly twenty years, I was a part of organizing the movement of Word Made Flesh—an international community of Christians who serve among the most vulnerable of the world’s poor. We were compelled by the vulnerabilities of children of war, children with HIV and AIDS, abandoned children, children living on the streets, women and children enslaved in the commercial sex industry, and widows abandoned by their families. As a community we entered these dark and desperate realities and surprisingly discovered the reign of God. Driven by our faith, youth and idealism, we established compassionate communities of justice in thirteen cities in the Majority World. Youth, of course, lasts only for a moment; idealism in the context of poverty, injustice, oppression and violence was challenged daily. It was our faith that remained the anchor for our service.

My faith and inevitable need for spiritual formation in the context of social activism motivate the telling of my personal story. After years of laboring with my community among the world’s poor, I was in need of a calm and grounded center that could withstand the buffeting of a world full of injustice and unrelenting demands. Contemplative prayer became an oasis in an active life that was becoming arid, and it taught me how “to be,” how to surrender my anxieties, compulsions and the suffering of my friends into the hands of God. Contemplative prayer taught me how to find rest in God. But the grace of contemplation also eventually led me into a life-altering dark night of the soul. The experience of internal darkness and subsequent transformation became a wellspring for my active life.

At the heart of Christian faith is the invitation to die and be reborn. During our lifetime we may be invited into a number of deaths and rebirths. The paschal mystery of Christ serves as a model for contemplative spirituality and spiritual formation: at any given point in life we may find ourselves identifying with the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus.6 Throughout these pages I detail my experience in the paschal mystery and hope that the telling of my story might encourage you to stay true to your own journey.

This is a story of following God, losing sight of God, seeking after and ultimately being renewed by God. This is a story of prayer as a centering, tethering event—an infusion of contemplation into a lifestyle of activism. This is a recurring human story, one...