Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Trust in the Place of Unity

You are called to live out of a new place, beyond your emotions, passions, and feelings. As long as you live amid your emotions, passions, and feelings, you will continue to experience loneliness, jealousy, anger, resentment, and even rage, because those are the most obvious responses to rejection and abandonment.

You have to trust that there is another place, to which your spiritual guides want to lead you and where you can be safe. Maybe it is wrong to think about this new place as beyond emotions, passions, and feelings. Beyond could suggest that these human sentiments are absent there. Instead, try thinking about this place as the core of your being - your heart, where all human sentiments are held together in truth. From this place you can feel, think, and act truthfully.

It is quite understandable that you are afraid of this place. You have so little knowledge of it. You have caught glimpses of it, you have even been there at times, but for most of your life you have dwelt among your emotions, passions, and feelings and searched in them for inner peace and joy.

Also, you have not fully acknowledged this new place as the place where God dwells and holds you. You fear that this truthful place is in fact a bottomless pit where you will lose all you have and are. Do not be afraid. Trust that the God of life wants to embrace you and give you true safety.

You might consider this the place of unification, where you can become one. Right now you experience an inner duality; your emotions, passions, and feelings seem separate from your heart. The needs of your body seem separate from your deeper self Your thoughts and dreams seem separate from your spiritual longing.

You are called to unity. That is the good news of the Incarnation. The Word becomes flesh, and thus a new place is made where all of you and all of God can dwell. When you have found that unity, you will be truly free.

- Henri Nouwen (The Inner Voice of Love)

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