… yielding not to an alien will but an affirming source …
The trouble with an alien will is that it is … alien, other. How can I know, respond to, and, in time, love something that is so far from and other than me? I will look outside myself, beyond this life, to another realm to know who to be and what to do. Then I am separated, as it were, from myself. Separation slips into anxiety: What is required of me to be acceptable, good enough, holy enough for God? How can I be more like God? I am in a catch-22 situation because I can never know the answers to these questions if God is alien.
Conversely, if God is “an affirming source” everything changes. If God is the source then I am because God is. God is the ground of my being. God is the source, and is a source that affirms. God is not alien, and not wilful. Surprisingly, it is rather like there being no god at all. What a relief!
This one, fundamental idea is at the very heart of a way of being in the world. I belong and I have everything I could possibly need. It is how I want to live. In essence, this is what I want to convey as a spiritual director and writer.
This is not identity: I am not God; I am not the Universe. This is belonging: God is what I am, my home, my birthright, “my place in the family of things”. God is the stuff I am made of; just as the Earth is the stuff I am made of; as stardust is the stuff I am made of. When I look at the stars (as I did last night) I know I belong: this body is made of the same matter, despite the loneliness of separation by distances too vast to imagine let alone traverse. Loneliness signifies kinship. And so I can call everything and everyone a sister or a brother, for that is what they are. Nothing is alien now.
God is “an affirming source.” God says, ”Yes,” to me and about me. Could it be that God’s first ‘word’ was “Yes”? And that I am, and you are, and everything is because of this “Yes”?
If God is “an alien will” there is always a tension between who-and-what-I-am and who-and-what-God-is. If God is an affirming source then I am who-and-what-God-is. There is no possibility of separation between God and me. I am not separated from myself. I can relax.
I look to and gaze at God, not to find out how to live and what to do, but to see revealed there the depth of the reality of who and what I am…
… and, more fundamentally, that I am.
I will never finally know who and what I am. But I know that I am – my presence as this body, as the being of God in this little scrap of the world, the outworking of God’s “Yes”. This is the cradle of joy.
[Coming soon: Part three]
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