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.”
While all opposites “work on” all of us at all times, it is likely that a particular pair will end up being especially relevant—either throughout our lives, or in certain seasons.
In my case, I discovered a key pair in my early forties, during my daily walking ritual. Every day, I pause to stand before a Marian grotto. Facing her, with her arms stretched out at her waist, I regularly offer a commitment—on one hand, to expectant abundance, and on the other hand, to perfect contentment.
The importance of this particular pair of opposites became clear as my family began to search for land on which to build a hobby farm retreat center (a longtime dream that had come to me twenty years earlier, while living for a short time with Benedictine sisters).
On the one hand, as we took steps to bring this vision to fruition, my hopes would rise and then be dashed, over and over again: Is this the one? What further problem or legal issue will arise now? What else could possibly go wrong? Again?! The deep longing for the right place to establish the dream made each up and down all the more painful.
So, I learned to set my intention to simply be content with what is: Oh, that plan fell through. I guess this is not the one. Oh, we have to do that in order to get what we want? Well, I guess it is not time yet. Waiting, waiting, and more waiting is a formative tool for learning perfect contentment with what is. When the time comes, it will finally come. The waiting and wondering feel very empty, like a carving out of my being.
And yet, during this same period, I would land on moments when my expectations of life were completely blown away. To my surprise, much more than I could have hoped for would emerge in other aspects of life. Who would have expected the God of the Universe to be so wildly abundant!?
So, I learned to let the two hands talk to each other and inform the posture of my daily living: on one hand, acceptance of being emptied, and on the other hand, expecting absolutely the fullness of abundance.
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 pairs of opposites have been particularly rich, formative, or challenging in your life?
- Have different pairs of opposites guided you during different seasons of your life? Or has one particular pair of opposites been a steady theme throughout your life?
- When have you experienced the tension between expectant abundance and perfect contentment? What did it teach you?
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