Awakening to Wholeness is a series of prompts, reflections, and teachings about how holding the tension of opposites can help us to heal division and experience wholeness. If you feel moved to share your own reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites” or tag us on social media with #EHoPWisdomOfOpposites.
When asked “where is God,” most children will point up and out. As it turns out, many adults carry the same assumption. Of course, there is the occasional, sweet child who will point inward toward the heart in response to the prompt, but most of us carry at least residual traces of the sense of God as “out there.”
To the extent that we recognize the Holy One as “more than” our particular selves, this tendency is helpful and steers clear of idolatry—that is, of limiting God to something smaller or less than what Divinity really is. However, a much more pervasive tendency also comes with the sense of God as “out there,” and this one is not so life-giving. It is unfortunate to imagine that God is separate from us.
A common expression of this negative tendency can be found in Christian circles, after a loved one has passed: we try to “explain” death to children (and perhaps ourselves) by saying that the dead person has now “gone to heaven to be with God.” Imagine the trauma of a literal five-year-old mind being told that God has taken their loved one away! Certainly, the shock of it sticks, and we carry a compartmentalized sense of God as “out there,” or “only at-these-times” into our adult lives.
In most cases, it is more convenient to compartmentalize God in the face of difficult conditions such as death, as well as in complex life circumstances. We often prefer a pretty, packaged response to our perplexing reality. The problem is that if we keep God packaged up in the sky, the transformative power of Love is less accessible to us when we are deeply suffering, or when we need the joy of gratitude.
A powerful invitation for us in the modern period, when our rational minds might prefer the controlled and contained packaging of compartmentalization, would be to pull that package down from the sky and bring it back to earth. In the midst of the muck and the mess and the death, to delight in unwrapping the lovely ribbons of our “God gift” and take the risk of letting go of control, order, and neatness. We may benefit from being stretched and uncomfortable when we allow God to be both up and down, in and out.
Contemplative Questions
We offer the following questions as prompts to help you reflect on the presence of opposites in your spiritual practice and your life.
- If you were asked “where is God,” what would you say? How has this answer changed (or not!) since you were a child?
- In your own life, have you compartmentalized God by imagining God to be “out there” or “up in the sky”? How did it make you feel? How did it impact your spiritual life?
- What teachings, prayer practices, or ordinary daily activities help to remind you that God is not separate from us?
Join the conversation! If you feel moved to share your reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites” or tag us on social media with #EHoPWisdomOfOpposites.
You can now sign up to have every post in the Awakening to Wholeness series delivered directly to your inbox. Subscribe here.
You must be logged in to post a comment.