A Lenten Musing

The invitation today in Lectio Divina, the Lenten study I have entered into for this period leading into Easter, is to 'listen with the ears of my heart', to let go my intellectual curiosity and simply embrace the spirit of the Word.

I struggle with this. Struggle to quieten not just my intellectual curiosity but also my resistance to faith versus religion, organized or disorganized, to Christianity with a capital 'C', to my perceptions and long held beliefs that have rested unchallenged in the desert of my heart.

Last night, as I drove home from a reception on CBC Radio 1 I listened to one of my favourite documentary programs, 'Ideas'. Last night's program, AND THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS… explored the dangers of moral certainty. One of the comments that really struck me was from an interviewee who stated that it is when we do not question our moral beliefs that we risk acting in immoral ways.

How do I know what I believe is true if I never challenge my beliefs?

I hold certain 'religious' beliefs, and beliefs about 'religion', that I have not challenged. They simply are. Set within me. Some rigid, set in stone. Some the quicksand of my thinking closing me off to hearing the stories of my heart calling me to dance.

This Lenten process for me is about challenging my thinking, and my feelings. It's about poking into my status quo, shaking the leaves of my beliefs, watching for snakes and butterflies to emerge while holding onto nothing.

The late British philosopher Bertrand Russell observed, “Most of the greatest evil that man has inflicted upon man comes through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.”

I was raised Catholic. The God of my childhood had a mighty hand. A fearsome temper. A judgemental heart. God knew all and He knew I was undeserving.

In this Lenten period, I enter the desert and follow the rhythm of my heart where ever it flows. Into belief. Disbelief. Accord. Discord. I follow the rhythm of the desert wind, unwinding myself into the flow. Sometimes, it feels immutable, encoded in my being like DNA, irreversible, unchangeable. My destiny of faith unmoving, unapproachable. Tensile steel, it holds me rigid in the past. A lodestone dragged throughout time.

I breathe and open myself up to expansion. I imagine my heart space spilling open, sand pouring out of the desert within. I breathe and challenge myself to flow freely. To flow into the rhythm of life, to flow into grace and be at One with the One who is all within me.

A Lenten Musing

In the desert of my heart, sand sweeps endlessly from here to infinity, an unmarred vista embracing my horizons, expanding my heartspace into time infinite and known throughout time.

In the desert of my heart, I slide effortlessly through time, swept-up into my lover's embrace, held captive in his undying love for the infinite beauty of my life revealed through time's eternal hands sweeping through my destiny.

In the desert, I am free. I am my life force pulsing, atoms spiralling into place, DNA unwinding, filling all space with the essence of my life connected to all life, connected to all.

In the desert, my heart expands out into the universe, touching the stars, calling down the moon to come, be my lover, be my heart throb, pulse beating wildly in this dance of life, a swirling dervish caught in a windstorm wildly careening into this universal dance of life which connects us all to the infinite majesty of our human condition. Connecting us to God. The source of all. The all within and without us.

In the desert of my heart, I accept the invitation to dance, to melt into oneness. To become my divinely inspired essence held lovingly in the arms of spirit. In my Oneness I reflect the amazing grace of my human condition and flow as One into the One who is all within me and without me.