STILLNESS
I dreamt I was suffocating, being crushed within a stone passage, and the more I tried to squeeze through the more stifling the pressure. The message is clear: if I’m to survive this passage, the eye of the needle, it will be through the stillness of union with you.
Through Lectio Divina I recently received reinforcing guidance cautioning me against well-intentioned, seemingly trustworthy advice about how this path should be traveled. With the divorce finalized in September, I’ve worked to empty myself of the last of my primary external attachments. In your mercy, you show me the external was merely the beginning.
The journey moves inward now, where the restless longing to press through this with expediency is even greater. This restiveness empowers a parallel pitfall: the pull to leave the path entirely. I’ve made peace with the loss of my explicit attachments, but the implicit tug to replace them is an inward allurement I must also surrender.
This surrender is complicated by others’ expectations. I have no idea how long this process will last or where it will lead. This openness is disparaged in an environment that prizes self-determination, ambition, and responsibility. The challenge is I identify with this reasoning, at least the responsibility part. I remind myself I had a good wife, a good family, a good career, and I didn’t give them up in vain. I didn’t lose them to replace them with alternative appropriations of the false self.
The real risk then isn’t actively walking away, but a preoccupation with others’ opinions. Such fixation might derail my progress by means of shame. Others may come to think little of me. My reputation may completely collapse. I may be considered a fool, without sense - one whom God has utterly abandoned. The spectre of such judgment is suffocating, a stone passage pressing the air from my lungs.
In the midst of it, I realize I’m only truly judged when I judge myself. I only suffocate when I suspect my accusers may be right, but the stillness of faith quells the writhing heart. My soul shouts for mercy: whatever is to come, whatever I face, my I fully receive it. Impart a measure of your grace, that I might empty myself once again, and again, and again, and forever, that I might be completely yours – eternally wed to you, to the transformation welling up within me like a spring.