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 the work of tending to the tensions of opposites, a key part of the work is to seek the “third thing,” the force that resolves or transforms the tension between the two opposing sides. In the case of the tension between our experiences of life and death, I wonder about our experiences of connection, or lack thereof, with the cloud of witnesses, the communion of saints, those who have passed to the other side of the veil of life.
What would it look like to hold the tension through our connection with them, even after death, rather than to collapse it? Instead of telling small children that their loved ones have “gone up to heaven to be with Jesus,” what would happen if, instead, we suggested that they can connect to grandma or grandpa at any time, in any place, now? No long car trips required. What if instead of saying our loved ones are now “with God,” as if they were not before, we recognized how they might be even closer to us now, in death, than they were in life? Albeit, in a very different sense of the word now.
I imagine the possibility of transforming our societal sense of loneliness, isolation, and angst, if we could recognize that we are not really alone: not in life and not in death. The veil between the two worlds of life and death can be a third-force threshold over which we cross often to draw from the healing energy of deep connections.
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.
- How would you describe your sense of connection with those who have died?
- What practices help you to strengthen your connection with cloud of witnesses, the communion of saints, those who have passed to the other side of the veil of life?
- How do you think your connection (whether strong, weak, or somewhere in between) with those who have died affects your personal experience of loneliness, isolation, or angst?
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.
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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.