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.
This is a guest post by EHoP community member Dianne Schlichting, in response to “Freedom To, Freedom From, Freedom For.”
We welcome contributions from all members of our community! To learn more, see the bottom of this page.
“Freedom in the One allows anyone…to become expansive even as they let go again and again.” These words suggest an umbrella-like protection from the pitfalls of freedom to, from, and for when those freedoms have no grounding except in pleasing the needs of one’s small self.
A prayer practice that I find to be expansive when grounded in prayer is the Ignatian form of contemplation. It is freeing in that one enters “in” to a scripture passage: for example, the call of the disciples Peter, James and John. Once within the prayer of the Word, one can move “to” an expanded experience by placing oneself within the setting. (How am I called to be a disciple today?)
Freedom becomes even more palpable when one moves into the “from” of the meditation: What am I coming “from” that is calling me into this scene? Who am I and what do I seek to learn from this prayer time? What is God’s movement in my heart now—am I being called from one way of serving into another?
Finally, the expansion continues when, letting go again, I ask the “for” question: For what purpose am I being led? Using the imagination allows a freedom to let go that allows my Spirit to respond to, from, and for when I involve my whole self in daily prayer.
Join the conversation! If you feel moved to share your reflections—either in response to one of our posts, or on the topic of the wisdom of opposites more broadly—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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Dianne Schlichting
Dianne is a member of EHoP; she and her husband John value the opportunity to share contemplative prayer and outreach with others who make the House of Prayer their spiritual home. Dianne is a wife, mother, and grandmother who loves spending time in nature, especially canoeing with John.
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