July/August 2007 (Vol. XX, No. 7)
"Is there enough Silence for the Word to be heard?"
May BLESSINGS OF INNER PEACE be with you, dear friends, as we journey together through this summer season. Wherever you may be, remember to rest in the Silence some time each day. Be mindful of Nature's summer dress and Her gifts freely offered, Her lessons freely given, for our well-being. This pilgrimage we travel through life will lead us along many different highways and byways; yet, the longest and deepest journey we make is the inward journey into the heart of Love. Travel safe ... travel well, dear companions along the way!
In being true to the small voice within, you are being of service to others and to the world in the most profound way possible. You cannot know where that voice will take you, but in being willing "to save the only life you could save," you are affirming one of the deepest and most sobering truths of all: no one else can ever walk your journey for you. You alone can respond to your call.
I first thought of the spiritual journey as a linear path towards a distant goal. Gradually, I came to realize that the spiritual journey is a closed circle of love in which we slowly come closer to the center of ourself, which is always present. In this journey there is no "progress" but a shifting of consciousness that unveils our own essential nature, "the face we had before we were born. "As this spiral path unfolds, so our concepts of both ourself and the journey change, and we come to realize the deeper truth: that the traveler, the journey, and the goal are all one.
The greatest journeys are made because of the call of the heart.
I see the way of the artist as a kind of pilgrimage. When you go on a pilgrimage, you set out from where you happen to be and start walking toward a place of great sanctity in the hope of returning from it renewed, enriched, and sanctified. However far you may walk, every pilgrimage is a safari into your own dark interior, an inner journey. For pilgrimages belong to the inner world, to the realm called the "religious."
If I set my heart upon another person, then I cannot live without that person. My heart becomes divided. If I give my heart to my life, on the other hand, if I give my heart to the journey with God, then my heart can be whole in a relationship with another. I can be heart and soul in the relationship because I am heart and soul in the journey of my life.
We journey together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable supplies of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace, preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and the love we give our fragile craft.
The serpentine path was the path of my life, a snakelike, meandering path, winding in and out, up and down. The antithesis of the "straight and narrow." A path that does not ever "come to a point." Two steps left, two steps right. Into the darkness, into the light. Not a goal, but the journey... . I did not know who or what might be ahead on the serpentine path, but I felt a sense of eagerness and anticipation. The dance is about to begin. The dance of my life. It begins anew every day.
We all belong in the heart of God. We belong in God; that is where our heart has its home. In God's heart we always find what we need: attentiveness, the responsiveness, the safe haven for our vulnerable selves. We all belong in the heart of God.
We all belong to God, not as a possession to be grasped, but as a partner in a loving union in which we become free and vibrantly alive. We all belong in the heart of God. Everyone belongs, for we journey together and we are who we are by virtue of our belonging to one another.
A journey may feel as if it sweeps towards the skyline, but the sound it makes is always within yourself. The seat of transformation is within.
It's strange how much time people spend traveling round and round the circle of existence and getting nowhere. The real journey–the journey all people are required to take to achieve integration, self-realization and fulfillment–"eternal life"–is the journey inwards, the journey to the center of the soul.
The spiritual journey is a story of a return to our heart, the very center of our being, that has been obscured by our driving compulsion to create our own identify.
I am being driven forward
Into an unknown lane.
The pass grows steeper,
The air colder and sharper.
A wind from my unknown goal
Stirs the strings of expectation.
Still the question:
Shall I ever get there?
There where life resounds,
A clear pure note
in the silence.
I am not sitting, I am on a journey. Spiritually we are always on the move. We are on a journey through the inward spaces of the heart, a journey not measured by the hours of our watch or the days of the calendar, for it is a journey out of time into eternity.
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.
The spiritual journey does not consist in arriving at a new destination of your ignorance concerning yourself and life and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins with spiritual awakening. The "finding" of God is a coming to one's own Self.