Meditations By Ian White Maher: Praise | Gratitude | Joy | Transformation

I don’t believe in a Golden Age. Stories about how great the world once was always strike me as fantasy and I think about my friend’s grandmother who once looked at me from the side of her eye saying, “The Good old days? There were no good old days.” But that doesn’t mean things haven’t been lost. In a similar way, those of us seeking our spiritual calling also find ourselves adrift in the world today. The decline in attendance at religious institutions in no way indicates a decline in desire for a sacred relationship. Many are just seeking a response for this desire elsewhere with many of us turning to the private chambers of our hearts having decided the institutions no longer serve us … or worse. And while there was never a Golden Age of God, something has been lost in this world of building your own religion, where we abscond into our climate-controlled rooms, isolated from the discomfort, but isolated nevertheless.

There is something that happens to us when you and I agree we’re in relationship, something that flows from my eyes into your eyes and from your eyes into my eyes. It is a sacred acknowledgment of our mutual being. Nietzsche, who was obsessed with his own independence, named this thing that happens between us a debt that we owe to one another. In our acknowledgement, I owe you something and you owe me something. The healthier, safer world we dream of prioritizes the sacred acknowledgement, the debt we owe one another. This doesn’t mean that people won’t come in and out of our lives, but when we lose someone we are invested in we are left with a hole, a void that cannot be filled because the relationship was not commodified. When we are invested in other people we are not replaceable.

Paradise is not a place with walls. Nor is it a place with no walls. Paradise is not an intellectual concept. Words are not going to get us there because in so many ways words force us to choose a side. The only answer is action, opening to the spiritual experience, being willing to be led by God into the awakened space of our unity in life and in love. It is time for us to raise the blinds and let the light shine in on our being by letting go of right and wrong, by letting go of the walls we use to divide us from others. The experience is not emptiness from a loss of identity, but joy as we encounter the love of all creation. Who has it and who does not have it? You have to answer with an action.

Maintaining a daily meditation or prayer practice is the single most common desire I hear expressed when talking with people about their spiritual lives. But often it is framed as a desire for something that is just beyond reach. I wish I had more time, they say. I wish I had more discipline. It is normal for people to struggle with a daily meditation or prayer practice. But lacking time and discipline, unfortunately, are not the reasons most people cannot commit. Many of us, if not most of us, have a hard time committing because we experience discomfort in the quiet of contemplation. Or, we imagine we will experience discomfort and we want to avoid it. It is a discomfort with ourselves. I believe the world suffers from a spiritual problem and the spiritual solution begins with the time I spend on my cushion befriending my anxieties and insecurities so I can understand and recognize them in my body.

We are not so helpless and so fallen that our salvation depends on the judgment of God. God has no judgment. God does not have the capacity to judge. The creative force only wants to be with us, to move through us, but we must be willing to embody this force, to make room in our lives to be transformed. Rather than saying, “I will transform my life,” how might our relationships change if we said, “please transform me so there may be more healing and forgiveness in the world.”

If you believe, as I do, that cultivating your spiritual life is vital to your sense of well-being in the world, vital to your very health then cultivating a sense of Yes in your life is of primary importance. Within us there is an awakening that wants to emerge. Thomas Merton once said we become contemplatives when God discovers itself in us, when God awakens in us. The awakening begins when we say yes and consent to the desire that comes from beyond our will.

We all suffer from an attention deficit disorder. Not in the sense that we can’t hold our focus, but that none of us get enough attention. And in our loneliness, we fill our lives with material substitutes for what we really want, which is just to be seen and heard and held. We are a culture that is gorging on material while starving for love and attention.

There have been decades of choices that brought you to this moment. Are you ready to follow the spirit further? What would your life be like is praise rested at the center of your being? Praise for being offered the opportunity to be lifted into freedom?

What keeps you from encountering the sacred love affair? Encountering God, experiencing the sacred as a living force in our lives, is the first step in healing our planet.