Chaos swirls all around us. Yet there is something timeless and unshakable about God's Presence in the world that cannot be rocked by human drama. And oftentimes it cannot be expressed in words alone. Blog Contributor Jerome Daley shares about how this is meant to be a great comfort to you, an anchor for your soul.
By Jerome Daley, Blog Contributor
A few days ago I woke up around midnight with roiling emotions. It wasn’t a personal conflict, but I felt conflicted about a set of relationships in my life. Predictably, it was in the middle of the night that my subconscious decided to churn through it all…and when I woke, my barely-conscious mind obediently took up the task. Knowing that mental gymnastics would solve nothing, I got up to pray and journal through my troubled thoughts.
I walked up the stairs to our prayer room, but instead of turning on the light, my gaze was drawn through the window to the wooded hillside glimmering in the sheen of several neighborhood lanterns.
The silhouetted trees stood stolidly in the deep calm with mystical awe. The contrast was gently jarring, my inner tumult juxtaposed by these peaceful sentinels keeping watch through the night.
“I am undisturbed.”
The wonder and beauty held me in reverence and whispered to my spirit: “I am undisturbed.” It wasn’t a voice as much as a simple, profound knowing that entered my awareness. And I realized that the Voice that spoke this wooded, leafy audience into existence echoes through it still. I wonder if David gazed upon a similar starlit sky when he penned his effusive words…
So if the Word-birthed creation still casts sacred words, what might they be saying? I’ll tell you what I heard that night; it went something like this:
Holy Realignment
And so it was from this newly-hopeful, freshly-grounded center, I found myself able to intercede for holy realignment within my community…without yielding to the clamorous currents of the drama itself.
Albert Einstein famously said that “no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it,” and I find this to be a pretty reliable maxim.
I cannot speak meaningfully to the deepest needs of either my own small family or the expansive human family unless I am rooted like the trees in an eternal, transcendent reality at once richly empathetic, yet fundamentally undisturbed.
God Alone is Enough
Saint Theresa of Avila, a sixteenth century Spanish monastic, mystic, and author of the enduring classic The Interior Castle, lived out this profound rootedness as she engaged a deeply tumultuous era that included the Spanish Inquisition and Catholic Reformation.
From that proving ground, she left us this prayer that described the crux of her relationship with God:
Let nothing upset you Let nothing disturb you Everything changes God alone is unchanging With God all things are possible The one who has God lacks nothing God alone is enough
The winds of crisis and dismay abate only momentarily in the brief sweep of our lives, and this current pandemic-stricken reality only doubles-down on the disturbances we are trying to weather together. Yet like those great wooded sentinels outside my window, we too can weather every storm if our roots run down deep into the heart of the earth, into God’s generous undisturbed self.
deep. discussions.
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