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.
Sigh. This is the eternal tension, both in scope and in constancy. On and on, human beings dance with the Divine. We often gaze longingly and passionately into the countenance of this partner. As we look out of ourselves, toward “the more,” we expect to see qualities such as Goodness, Truth, Beauty. We hope for activities such as faith, hope, and Love.
If we are lucky, we notice the glimpses of our partner gazing back at us. We are able to know ourselves as beloved, good, faithful, and true. We can recognize that those qualities that we seek to find in the Other of the Holy One are refractions of those same qualities already shining within us, even as we look out of ourselves in search of them.
Some teachers dare to suggest that these refractions are not meant to be only occasional glimpses of the Divine Life, but rather, that we are all made to participate fully in the Divine Life—that we have the innate capacity, dignity, and holiness to be able to imitate our Dance Partner, to follow the lead of the Holy One and become more fully human as we seek to find our likeness in, and imitate, the Divine.
May we dance confidently! May we trust that we were made to move and live and have our being in this sacred dance of Love between the human and Divine.
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 you look out of yourself and toward the Divine in prayer, what do you see?
- What does the Divine reflect back to you? Can you describe a time when it helped you to recognize yourself as beloved, good, faithful, true?
- When do you feel that you are participating fully in the Divine Life? What prayer practices or teachings help you most fully experience the dance between human and Divine?
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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