Lectio
“If one reaches the point where understanding fails, this is not a tragedy: it is simply a reminder to stop thinking and start looking. Perhaps there is nothing to figure out after all: perhaps we only need to wake up.”
— Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite
Meditatio
We cannot think our way into a spiritual awakening. There is not a secret formula or philosophy that we can analyze or apprehend which will take us closer to the true nature of the Spirit. We cannot discover God in a book, lecture, or debate. The Divine Mystery is not unfolded within us through understanding alone.
Awakening spiritually is something that happens to us, not something we make happen by sheer force of thought or will. Though God may reveal Godself to us in and through whatever means God sees fit, our efforts are not for nothing. To seek, to ask, to knock — these are not techniques for producing God but the natural movements of a heart already being drawn toward Him.
This does not mean that our efforts to understand God are in vain. God desires that we desire Him — and the desire itself is His, already at work in us before we turn toward Him. Whatever honest attempts we make of good heart to seek Him are ultimately pleasing to Him. However, whatever understanding of God we attain through our finite means will necessarily fall short of His infinite glory.
It is in this place of surrender to our own inability to understand God that God begins to show us His true face. It is in the acceptance of our powerlessness to apprehend His infinite love, grace, and mercy, that He avails us of these very things, or that we come to find that, while they were always just out of reach, they were, in fact, nearer to us than we are to ourselves — that He was always nearer to us than we are to ourselves. We were simply looking for Him with our eyes closed.
And so God invites us to arise from our spiritual slumber — not through thought or effort alone, but through something we cannot engineer: the crucifixion of all things finite. The self that believed it could think its way to God must be laid down. And it is there, in that laying down, that resurrection becomes possible — not the resurrection of our striving, but the resurrection of our own divine nature in Christ, the nature that was always already ours, waiting beneath the noise of our own seeking. We are invited to wake up to what has never been absent — only unseen — and the good news, the Gospel news, is that we can’t do it.
Oratio
Limitations Binding
Lord let me feel You
help me to know You
not by my understanding
but through communion in You
my ways have failed me
my limitations bind me
You are the source of my longing
Your eternal Presence in me
You are my everything
my rest, my awakening
my hope and salvation
the Love within which we abide
Contemplatio
What would it mean for you to wake up — not to something new, but to what has never been absent?
Related Scripture
“Neither seek what is too difficult for you, nor investigate what is beyond your power. Reflect upon what you have been commanded, for what is hidden is not your concern.”
— Sirach 3:21-22 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Stillness Recollecting Stillness: The Longing Beneath Our Longing, which explores the same territory from a different angle — asking whether stillness is something we find, or something that finds us, and what it means to stop manufacturing the very presence we are seeking.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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