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.”
Modern scientists, especially in the field of quantum physics, are addressing some of life’s big questions in ways similar to theologians: What are the laws of nature? How do we deal with our lack of knowledge when paradox confronts us, when we are no longer certain of what we thought we knew?
Some scientific examples include the question of whether atoms behave as particles or waves: sometimes, it seems, the answer is both! Another is the idea of entanglement, that when two molecules have interacted, they continue to interact directly, even over large distances. In one measurement, a molecule was really, actually “somewhere,” yet the same measured molecule also appears to not really be anywhere. What we thought we knew, it turns out, we didn’t.
These scientific conundrums feel resonant to the spiritual journey. In childhood, and even into adulthood, many of us were taught, and continue to pray to a God who is really, actually “somewhere,” hopefully helping us out, from some fancy place like heaven. In some cases, the prayers to that interventionist God stop “working” for us, or on us, and though we may continue to offer prayers, they seem to be offered to a God who is not really anywhere, at least in the apophatic, transcendent sense of not being able to pinpoint God to any one location, or concept, or image.
How then, to really pray through these shifts? What prayers can be offered and really, actually received, if the “too small” prayers of personal favors to an interventionist God, and the “too big” prayers that maybe never land on the doorstep of a God deeper and wider than the universe, don’t seem to be working anymore? What are the “just right,” Goldilocks prayers that feel really real somewhere, and are actually heard and make a difference in the big land of anywhere?
So far, the best my mind and heart can come up with is the power of Presence as prayer. When practicing Presence, I put my whole self in, I am completely open, I give my all. By graced Mystery, the All of my Whole somehow participates in and aligns with the Presence of the Whole. In that interconnection, the prayer is offered really somewhere through me, even as it rests in the actually nowhere of the Holy One.
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 we thought we knew, it turns out, we didn’t.” Can you think of a time you were confronted by contradiction or paradox, when you discovered that something you thought you knew, you didn’t really? What did it feel like? How did you respond?
- Can you think of times your prayers felt “too small” or “too big”? How did you pray through the unknown?
- What habits, relationships, teachings, or spiritual practices help you to sit with the contradictions, paradoxes, and uncertainties of existing as a self, part of a Whole?
Join the conversation! If you feel moved to share your reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites.”
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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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