What is my purpose in life? How am I to know what to do in order to make the world a better place? What do I really, most deeply desire?
God as Up, But Not Down
When asked “where is God,” most children will point up and out. As it turns out, many adults carry the same assumption. Of course, there is the occasional, sweet child who will point inward toward the heart in response to the prompt, but most of us carry at least residual traces of the sense of God as “out there.”
Topics:
Contemplative Practice
In and Out
If you ever played the Hokey Pokey as a child, you’re familiar with the thrill of placing a body part “in” and then “out” and then “shaking it all about!” Whereas the ups and downs are found on the vertical spatial plane and the back and forth are found on the horizontal spatial plane, to be “in or out” is a three-dimensional take on spatial reality.
Topics:
Contemplative Practice
Back and Forth
“Back and forth” is another pair of opposites that helps us to understand contemplative dialogue spatially. Similar to the ups and downs, the back and forth are a set of spatial opposites that symbolically represent many layers of meaning. But whereas the ups and downs are vertical in orientation, the back and forth are horizontal. And where the ups and downs often come naturally, like gentle undulations, the back and forth tend to come more reactively and feel harsher.
Topics:
Contemplative Practice
Ups and Downs
In the hard work of contemplative dialogue, one of the easiest places to see opposites at work is in the meaning we make out of our experience of being limited by time and space. Up and down, back and forth, and in and out: these three sets of opposites reveal some of the shadows hidden in our assumptions about spatiality—in other words, our experience of reality as limited by space.
Topics:
Contemplative Practice
The Power of Three
During high school at TEC retreats, we received a stern warning: boys are blue, and girls are red—don’t make purple! While definitely a clear message from our leaders about social-sexual expectations, this binary warning also reveals the cultural undercurrents about our caution, concern, and even fear about what might happen when we mix up things that seem different—even opposite—from one another. Unfortunately, such worry and fear stifle the potentially transformative Power of Three.
Topics:
Contemplative Practice