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.
Each spring, I delight in the “greening” of the forest as I look out the window of the Oratory. All winter, as I look out, I can see all the way through the forest. The trees are bare in the winter because the fears have fallen, and the sightlines of simplicity allow me to see the depth of the forest. Paradoxically, the emptiness of the forest in winter affords me a glimpse of the whole. In spring, when the season of greening arrives, I prepare for the flux of wholeness.
At first, it is just the tiny buds that appear above on the branches. Then, short shrubs & grasses below. Slowly, the leaves fill out and unfold. Day by day, the sightlines of simplicity disappear, and at some point, I can no longer see through the forest. The flux of the leaves filling out now affords me a different viewpoint on wholeness. The newly-greened leaves flutter and flow in the wind. Since I can no longer see through the forest, I must learn to see things differently. As I lose the depth aspect of looking all the way through the forest, I gain the breadth aspect in the complexity and dynamism of the fullness of the leaves.
It is tempting to become annoyed by the changing leaves. Their shifting can feel too much like busyness, rather than fullness. Perhaps that temptation speaks more of my reality than that of the forest. Busyness may be the lens, or bias, from which my habituated ways of being tempt me into seeing things. I recall Evelyn Underhill’s approach for seeing and being: the contemplative pathway is the art of seeking union with both the flux and the whole of life, of reality. The fullness and flux of the leaves in the summer are just as instructive as the simplicity and emptiness of the forest in the winter.
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.
- What settings or situations help you to recognize the wholeness of life?
- What settings or situations help you to recognize flux?
- Do you find that you tend to prefer one over the other? What spiritual practices help you to find union with both the flux and the whole of life?
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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Christine Luna Munger
Christine Luna Munger, PhD currently serves as the director of the Episcopal House of Prayer. She previously served as Coordinator of the Spiritual Direction Certificate and Professor of Theology at St. Catherine University. She regularly writes, teaches, and leads group prayer sits at EHoP.
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