The Divine is Not Nervous

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Before you read any further, I want to ask you to do one small thing with me. Wherever you are, let your shoulders drop. Take one breath, a little slower than the last one.

And notice. Is there something in you right now that is in a hurry? Something tight. Something bracing itself, waiting for the next piece of bad news. You don’t have to fix it. You don’t have to explain it. Just notice that it is there.

Stay here a moment before reading on.

Hold on to whatever you found. We will come back to it.

…

The time we are living in is an important time. It is a challenging time. It is also an exciting time. And it is a time of great despair, and great misunderstanding.

As we go through it, we are finding that many of the things we depended on, trusted, thought would always be there, are either becoming unstable, or disappearing, or being challenged about whether they were ever honest in the first place. And so many of us are feeling abandoned by the very things we trusted. We don’t know where to look for that sense of assurance. Everything seems to be in flux. What appeared solid, now that we have finally reached out and touched it, we are realising was never solid at all.

But here is the thing. We never touched it before. We never came close to it. We just agreed.

It is something like the Emperor’s clothes, that story we all heard as children. We joined the crowd and we kept saying, yes, the Emperor’s clothes are beautiful. Because we figured that if we said anything else, we would be shamed. We figured there was something wrong with us. Something we weren’t seeing. Something we weren’t understanding. We were just told to trust. Told to believe. Told to accept.

We never touched it. We just agreed.

And all of that is important. But at the same time, there is an uneasiness in us now. Even though we followed the path. Even though we trusted the way.

And that uneasiness is sending people in two directions. Some are going into despair, into lostness, not knowing what to hold on to any more. And others are digging in, holding on even more tightly to what is passing away. And I want to say plainly that second one is not stubbornness. It is fear. It is the same fear, wearing different clothes.

But there is another way. And I believe this time is calling us to it. I believe this time is calling us to look within.

Now, when I say we have not been invited to look within, I don’t mean it was never ours. The looking within is our own inheritance. The desert fathers and mothers, Julian of Norwich, the old contemplatives — that is the Christian family tree. What happened is that we buried it. We handed it over to the specialists, the monks and the mystics, and the ordinary person was told their business was to believe and to attend. The treasure was in the house all along. We just locked the room.

So this is a deliberate time. A time when we are being given the opportunity, if we choose to take it, to take back our power — and to realise it was always ours.

…

Let me say what I mean by power, because that word carries a lot of weight, and most of the time when people hear it, they hear power over. The power that has been used on them. By the boss. By the government. By somebody with more money. That is not what I am talking about.

Think of it this way. A mother walks into a room where her children are quarrelling, and she doesn’t say a word, and the room changes. She has not threatened anybody. She has not raised her voice. Something about her simply being there, and being wholly herself, rearranges the room. That is power by presence.

Or think of somebody sitting at a hospital bedside who says nothing at all for two hours, and when they leave the sick one says, I am glad you came. What did they do? Nothing you could put on a list. They were there. That is the power I am speaking of.

It is not power over. It is power by virtue of presence. Power by virtue of my existence. It is because I am.

And because I am, I belong to the great I Am. That is my birthright, as we would say. That is my inheritance. Because of whose I am.

Let me put that simply, because it is the heart of the whole thing. When God is asked for a name, the answer that comes back is not a title. It is not a job. It is, I am. Being itself. And every one of us who can say I am — I am here, I am alive, I am breathing this morning — is already standing inside that. You don’t have to earn your way in. You don’t have to qualify. Every breath you drew this morning was given to you, and it is given again with the next one. You are held in being, moment by moment, by the One who simply is. Not as a stranger who has been let in at the gate. As a child of the house. And you have been held like that from the day you were born. So when I say stand in your power, I mean stand in that. I am held. I belong. I share in the life that holds me. I am not a visitor here.

I am held. I belong. I am not a visitor here.

In some ways this is frightening, because we have not had to do it before. But it is also liberating. Because this is a time when we are being called on to create something new, and we are being given the chance to take part in the making.

But as I said, there is fear. And many would prefer to hold on to what is passing away than to take part in the behold, I am making all things new.

And I am sharing this with you simply so that you know you are not alone. Others may not be saying anything to you about it. But many of us are in the same place. Many of us are beginning to see. Beginning to feel that sense of being uprooted.

And that is where the danger comes, because the first instinct is to replant the roots immediately. Anywhere. Quickly. Because we are afraid the plant will die.

. . .

But I prefer a different picture. I prefer the caterpillar.

The caterpillar feeds and feeds, and then comes to a point where it goes into the chrysalis. And what happens in there is not tidy. It produces within itself the very thing that breaks down everything it had already become. Everything it had already formed. And if that caterpillar had consciousness, it would be petrified. It would think it was dying. It would have no idea that something beautiful was up ahead.

But the caterpillar has no self-awareness, so it simply allows the process.

And that is where we differ. Because we have free will. And free will is both a blessing and a curse. It gives us the opportunity to take part consciously — and it gives us the terror of the unknown, and of knowing that we don’t know. But that is the human journey.

And here is what the caterpillar cannot teach us. For the caterpillar, allowing simply happens. For us, allowing is a choice. And that choice is the participation.

We tend to think that taking part means taking charge. It does not. The old contemplatives had a word for what I mean, and the word is consent. Saying yes to what God is doing in us, before we can see what it is.

Think of Yeshua in the garden, the night before. He is not being carried along like the caterpillar. And he is not in control either. He says, not my will, but yours. And that is the most active thing a human being has ever said. That is what taking part looks like. Not grabbing the wheel. Opening the hand, on purpose.

So my intention in sharing with you at this time is to say: trust what is within.

. . .

Many of us know the words. Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. And it is true. But the interpretation can be a challenge.

We have focused so much on a God who is outside of us, up there, elsewhere, that we hear those words and we take ourselves out of it altogether. As though something is happening somewhere else and we are just waiting to be told. But if we recognise that God is also near — God within, God closer to you than your own breath — then that verse becomes an invitation. An invitation to come away from that little mind that thinks it is in charge, and to come into the heart.

Because the heart is where we meet the divine. That is where the spark lives.

But I need to be careful here, because when we hear the word heart, most of us hear feelings. And that is not what the old words meant. In the Hebrew of that proverb, the heart is the whole of the inner person. Your thinking is in there. Your choosing is in there. Your longing is in there. Paul prays that the eyes of our heart may be enlightened. The heart has eyes. So with all thine heart does not mean switch off your mind. It means bring all of you. The mind included.

What we are being asked to set down is something smaller. Thine own understanding. That small, calculating part of us that thinks it is in charge, running on what everybody else is saying and whatever we happened to pick up along the way, and checking only with itself. We are not being asked to stop thinking. We are being asked to stop thinking alone, and to let the whole of us, mind and love and will together, open to that place of meeting. And to trust that.

And I know what our world says. Use your head. Don’t follow your heart. And there is some sense in that, because people have done terrible things following their feelings. But the trouble with that advice is that it cuts us in two. The head in one room, the heart in another, and God, if anywhere, in neither. The old words are asking for something whole.

And somebody else will remember another verse. The heart is deceitful above all things. Jeremiah said that, and he was not wrong. Left to itself, turned in on itself, the heart will tell us whatever we want to hear. People do wrong things every day and say the heart told them so. So how do I know the difference? How do I know it is the heart turned towards God, and not just what I want?

But Jeremiah does not leave it there. Later, the same prophet hears God say something remarkable. I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest.

From the least of them. Not the specialists. Not only the monks and the mystics. You. The same heart that can deceive us is the heart God has promised to write upon. And that promise is already given, and it is still unfolding. Both. The writing is there, and we are still learning to read it.

So the question is not whether to trust the heart. It is how to read what has been written there. And the people who walked this road before us left some marks along the way. Let me offer a few that I have come to trust.

. . .

The first. Wanting is loud and it is in a hurry. It says now, and it says if you don’t move now you will lose it. Remember what you noticed at the very beginning, that hurry in you? The deeper voice is not like that. It is quiet, and it will wait for you. It will still be there tomorrow morning saying the same thing. So when something is rushing you, that is usually not the voice of the divine. The divine is not nervous.

The second. Wanting flatters you. It tells you that you are right, and that they are the problem. The deeper voice usually asks something of you. It tends to inconvenience you. It will often ask you to go and apologise to somebody you would rather not apologise to. If the voice always agrees with you, it is probably your own.

The third. Look at what it leaves behind. Wanting gives you a rush and then an emptiness afterwards. The deeper voice leaves a kind of settledness, even when what it asked of you was hard. You can be grieving and still be settled. That is how you know.

And the fourth, which matters most on this island. Many of us were raised not to put our business in the street. Keep your own counsel. Don’t let people know your business. And there is wisdom in that; not everybody is safe to tell. But somewhere along the way, keeping our business turned into carrying everything alone, and we got good at it. Too good. So hear this. Don’t do this by yourself. Find one or two people who love you and who are not impressed by you. Not the crowd. Remember the crowd in the Emperor’s story; they all agreed. It was a child who told the truth, somebody with nothing to protect. That is the kind of person I mean. They are not there to teach you, and they are not there to decide for you. The same words are written on their heart as on yours. They are there to recognise it with you. So say it out loud, and listen to yourself saying it. The heart was never meant to be read in private. And be careful of anything in you that says, don’t tell anybody about this.

Now, none of these four stands on its own. Quiet can sometimes be numbness. The voice that asks something hard of us can sometimes be an old guilt, still talking. Settledness can be plain comfort. And company can turn into a crowd. Held together, they keep one another honest.

The heart was never meant to be read in private.

…

So when the old words say, in all thy ways acknowledge him — that is a whole-bodied thing. A fully participating thing. In all your ways. Not in the religious corner of your life. In all of it.

And this is the time we are in. We are being asked to take part fully. We are not the caterpillar, simply being carried along. We are asked to be fully conscious, to consent with our eyes open. And this consciousness is not head knowledge. It is a full awareness, where a person is open in the heart to the divine presence, and knows that presence.

That is what it means to acknowledge him in all our ways. And he will direct the path.

This is where we are. In this time. In this age. We are being liberated from the old understanding and invited into the heart.

Our Western world came through a long season of education for its own sake. And we are now coming into a place where we are finding the deeper way of being. The way of the heart.

When we first journey that way, it can feel tumultuous. But the more we lean on it, and the more we let it guide us, the more it begins to feel like home. And it becomes our true way of being.

…

Before we finish, let us stop once more. Bring to mind one thing you are carrying at the moment. A decision. A worry. A conversation you have been putting off. Don’t try to solve it. Just hold it in front of you, gently, and ask it three things. Are you rushing me? Are you flattering me? Could I say you out loud to somebody who loves me?

Stay here a moment before reading on.

Whatever you noticed, that is enough for today. That is where it begins.

So do not be alarmed by all that is taking place. It is simply an invitation. An invitation to return to that old phrase we said so many times in our youth, and to understand at last what it really means. So hear it again, slowly.

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding.

In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.

This reflection is also offered as a spoken episode on HIER Space.