Sean, my Yogic Irish dairy farmer, explained our chaotic world to me in this way. "Imagine that the universe is a great spinning engine," he said. "You want to stay near the core of the thing -- right in the hub of the wheel -- not out at the edges where all the wild whirling takes place, where you can get frayed and crazy. The hub of calmness -- that's your heart. That’s where God lives within you. So stop looking for answers in the world. Just keep coming back to that center and you'll always find peace."
When changewinds swirl through our lives, they often call us to undertake a new passage of the spiritual journey: that of confronting the lost and counterfeit places within us and releasing our deeper, innermost self–our true selves. They call us to come home to ourselves, to become who we really are.
I was caught suddenly by a sweep of reverence, by a sensation that made me want to sink to my knees. For somehow I knew that I had stumbled upon an epiphany, a strange gracing of my darkness... That was the moment the knowledge descended into my heart and I understood. REALLY understood. Crisis, change, all the myriad upheavals that blister the spirit and leave us groping — they aren't voices simply of pain but also of creativity. And if we would only listen, we might hear such times as beckoning us to a season of waiting, to the place of fertile emptiness.
As the conversation turned to waiting, Brother Anthony leaned forward in his chair. "Contemplative waiting is consenting to be where we really are," he explained. "People recoil from it because they don't want to be present to themselves. Such waiting causes a deep existential loneliness to surface, a feeling of being disconnected from oneself and God. At the depths there is fear, fear of the dark chaos within ourselves.
Brother Anthony was exactly right. Ultimately, we are fleeing our own dark chaos. We are fleeing ourselves.
There are some things that we simply must wait in silence to receive. We live our questions and wait for the knowing to happen. Like the tree, we wait for the sap to rise.
