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.
In my early twenties, I went through a quarter-life crisis. Studies in theology and peace turned my entire worldview (including my sense of the Sacred!) upside down. The anthropomorphic, personal images of God, to whom I prayed in my journals at least twice daily, began to lose their ability to help me make sense of the world and my place in it. At the same time, I began to sense the Sacred in new and unconventional places.
Frankly, the shifts in my prayer and my images of God freaked me out! My regular prayer forms fell apart, and I no longer knew how to address, or be addressed by, this Presence that seemed to show up in the wind and in the suffering of others. What would I tell my theology professors? How would I explain to my mom that our investment in my education had caused a crisis in my faith!?
Over time, of course, I learned that periods of intense stretching and widening are a natural precursor to the process of deepening, of becoming mature in my faith. The God of my youth was “stuck” in a single, increasingly irrelevant image. Letting go of the earlier images meant also consenting to a path of unknowing.
It was hard to navigate the new terrain without the familiar forms from my youth. Yet as I grew and matured, I discovered that God was more than capable of meeting me where I was, at every point along the way.
Letting go of the narrow, limiting image of God as strictly “personal” shifted the entire relationship. As a “person,” God was easily objectified, a “something” I could project my inner world out towards. As a relational God, the Holy One became both beyond me, as Mystery, and deep within me, as Intimacy.
Within this widened and deepened sense of the Sacred, I recognized the Hand of the Holy one as active always and everywhere. Everything could address me, especially if I opened myself to the Mystery of deep interrelatedness between myself, Others, and God. Releasing my single, personalized image for God opened way to a Myriad of Manifestations through which the Holy One speaks and acts.
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.
- When have you experienced a crisis in your faith? How did it make you feel?
- What images or ideas did your crisis force you to let go of? What tensions or opposites did this crisis require you to hold?
- How did God reach out to meet you along the way?
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.
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