True spirituality is about self-surrender, about bringing our wills into alignment with the will of God. Not about the cessation of pain. Throughout history there have been many cases of people finding God while under lock and key. My own experience in jail confirms for me that something does happen when our souls hit rock bottom, when we are trapped in prisons that are sometimes of our own making and not always constructed of iron and steel. Life can sometimes feel like a cage from which there is no escape...Yet, beyond the crucible of spiritual darkness is the light of inner redemption. If we believe that a descent into the abyss can ultimately make us stronger, we will outlive the nightmare. The challenge is to brave our dark nights and wait for the dawn.
We all have moments in which we are jolted out of our habitual anxiety, when we surrender control and let go of self-conscious judgments In those moments we can just "be." We can feel refreshingly open, clear, and complete. Our mental clutter and confusions fall away, and we remember with great joy our oneness with all that is. At such moments the whole universe dances inside us!
Blessing offers us a personal consciousness-raising practice, a spiritual adventure bringing sensitivity and gratitude into the foreground of our lives. While we all have moments when a blessing rises spontaneously to our lips, the path of blessing can become a way of life. Through the practice of blessing we develop an ever-deepening receptivity to the abundant love and joy flowing through creation. We learn to accept that love, absorb it into our souls, and offer it back to the Source with joy. In this way we come to feel the Presence of God move within us and through us.
The Name unites us all in a wondrous dance of being. One way of knowing God's Name is by linking our own life-breath with the life-breath of creation. Consider how it will affect even our casual conversation when we realize that each time we breathe, we call God's Name. Whenever we breathe we invoke the sacred. How this awareness will change the way we use our breath and our speech. The Name calling us most fully to embrace the divinity breathing throughout Creation, is the one Name we cannot appropriate, the one Name we cannot own.
