If love is opening to embrace life and our unconditional experience and fear is holding on tight in pain and resistance, what will it take to open our hearts and beings to love? What will it take for us to say yes to our pain or trials allowing them to pierce through us just as Christ was pierced on the cross when he gave his life to transmute all of our human errors and mistakes and show there is a path to rise again by opening?
I listened to a very inspiring talk by Joyce Meyer on humility last night.. In this talk she spoke of the fact meekness is not weakness but has an unbending strength inside it, the ability to tolerate and hold injustice while patiently awaiting God’s opportunity to regain our power and break free. For those who do not know Joyce was sexually abused by her father and her mother did nothing about it.. It took her a long time to come to the point of forgiveness where God told her to care for both parents in old age.. She tells about this with a lot of humor in another one of her You Tube sermons..
In the sermon I watched Joyce speaks of the humility of Christ, his willingness to bend to the father’s will as well as the necessity for a kind of crucifixion to come before the resurrection. So we think to a degree a lot in unaware narcissistic terms when we forget that suffering or loss is part of life and not always a sign of something going wrong and then blame ourselves or others for having a human reaction and bending to embrace it.. see that as some kind of ‘weakness’ or ‘error.’ When we won’t open our hearts to love and let in grief, allow loss and the heart and soul opening that entails then in some way we sin against the laws of God which have to do with change and constant re cycling of forms in the flow of unending change.
I am reading a very powerful book which contains a number of writings by pastor Henri Nouwen lately called Turn My Mourning Into Dancing. For those who don’t know Henri suffered a considerable period of depression where he questioned his faith and life purpose, he was then invited to become part of an resident in a community of disabled people called Daybreak.. Here he wrote a lot and continued his ministry.. A lot of what he writes is about this opening up and letting go process. Today I am inspired to share this excerpt from his book.. I find so much inspiration in Henri’s teachings.. They speak of the joy that can come from embracing grief and loss with open arms as an intrinsic part of human experience rather than about blocking and defending an entrenched narcissistic position that only ends up keeping us in prison mentally, emotionally and spiritually while leading us to avoid both an opening and deepening in our soul journey.
Quoting C.S. Lewis. :
To love at all is to be vulnerable. If you want to make sure of keeping (your heart) in tact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully around with little hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements: lock it up safely in the casket of your selfishness. But in that casket…. it will change.. It will not be broken – it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable….The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from the danger of love is Hell.
In so many ways, the more we insist on control and the more we resist the call to hold our lives lightly, the more we have to deny the reality of our losses and the more artificial our existence becomes. Our belief that we should grasp tightly what we need provides one of the greatest sources of our suffering. But letting go of possessions and plans and people allows us to enter, for all its risks, a life of new, unexpected freedom.
How can we live with a greater willingness to let go? Another step in turning our mourning into dancing has to do with not clutching what we have, not trying to reserve a place we can rest in, not trying to choreograph our own or other’s lives, but surrender to the God whom we love and want to follw, God invites us to experience our not being in control as an invitation to faith.
It is my belief we find God inside the love we can experience as we learn to both let go and keep opening our heart fully to each and every thing, person, feeling and experience life presents us with
Emerging From The Dark Night 