The Contemplative Companion for Tuesday, September 12, 2017

It’s been just over two months since I last wrote a daily Contemplative Companion. I’ve taken the summer as a season of personal rest from writing. In June, I finished a long manuscript of my forthcoming book Contemplative Church, and felt the need to be quiet and still. I sensed I was arriving at a threshold – in multiple dimensions of my life. And I also felt that there were enough words already in the world. Mine aren’t needed – at least for a while!

Try as I may not to write, it’s an impossible aim. Writing for me is more like breathing. Without it, my faculties seem to freeze-up, and I loose something vital. Writing keeps me in the healthy flow of spiritual, psychological and even emotional oxygen.

That said, the intention of the daily Contemplative Companion is not about me – but about us. It’s about a community of people all around the world who also feel joy in being reminded through words and silence, stillness and relationality, forest and cathedral, who they really are amidst the onslaught of life-activity, responsibility, and entertainment. And in remembering who we really are, it’s impossible to miss what God is.

Going forward, you will notice a somewhat new format for the daily Contemplative Companion. They will remain brief  and practical (particularly important in our fast-paced, information overloaded, media-rich, always WiFi-connected context). What will be new is expanded quotes from more diverse spiritual sources, as well as other writers in addition to myself. And, I trust, a more expanded and deepened moment of comment and application. In the past, the focus was primarily commenting on the lectionary scripture reading for the day. In the future, quotations will arise from expanded, inter-spiritual contemplative sources.

And with that acknowledgment, I both conclude and begin with a paragraph from Paramahansa Yogananda:

“I found God more tempting than temptation…I found God more desirable than anything else. I am anchored in that Spirit…The joy of material things fades away, but the joy of God never fades. It is an eternal romance with the Spirit. It is joy indescribable. Although you find glimpses of the Divine, don’t be satisfied; go deeper within, and you will sit at the brink of eternity facing God. There, in the land beyond all your dreams, where the well of God is eternally springing, in the heart and soil of your soul, there you can go in the ark of silence.  God is waiting…”*

Deeper. That’s a word that says so much. It’s less a place, and more of a never ending process. In part, because God is All-Loving-Endlessness. We can all ask, seek and pursue a little more deeper today. And we can begin this moment. We begin in our intention. And our intention fuses with our spirit, and our spirit is aided by the Spirit of God, whose passion is to reveal to us from depth to depth to depth.

*Paramahansa Yogananda, The Divine Romance, p. 401.

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