Strange companions

Notes from a different drummer

Learning the unforced rhythms of grace

I will give you treasures from dark, secret places; 

then you will know that I am the LORD 

and that the God of Israel has called you by name. 

                                                           Isaiah 45:3 (Good News Bible)

The practical How.

The notes from the drummer have reached your inner ear. You are waking up and gradually you realise something is being born. There is no reason for panic.

But it can still be a very confusing experience. And it can be made all the more difficult if you are not introduced to some strange companions that will accompany you on the journey. You are sure to encounter them and should you not be told that they are to be expected, their presence can indeed lead to anxiety and further uncertainty. You might think that you are totally lost and even doubt whether a birthing process is underway at all. Worst of all, their gift can be totally missed.

Naming them is to a large degree merely showing the different faces of the same thing, but it will help to recognize them when they announce themselves.

They are known as darkness, depression, confusion, uncertainty. It is such a part and parcel of the spiritual journey within the mystical tradition that it even has a collective name: liminal space.

In 2013, when we were right in the middle of our own time of confusion, we wrote the post Liminal space

I am giving Richard Rohr’s very good description that appeared in that post here as well:

“Limina is the Latin word for threshold, the space betwixt and between. Liminal space, therefore, is a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading them.

 It is when you have left the “tried and true” but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out-of-the-way. It is when you are in between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. It is not fun.

Think of Israel in the desert, Joseph in the pit, Jonah in the belly, the [women] tending the tomb. Few of us know how to stay on the threshold. . .Inside of sacred (liminal) space you can – if you can dare imagine it – hear God. Inside of sacred space you can see things in utterly new ways. Ways that seem foreign and ever dangerous to those trapped inside the closed system.

Nothing good or creative emerges from business as usual. This is why much of the work of God is to get people into liminal space, and to keep them there long enough so they can learn something essential. It is the ultimate teachable space, maybe the only one. Most spiritual giants try to live lives of “chronic liminality” in some sense. They know it is the only position that insures ongoing wisdom, broader perspective and ever-deeper compassion.”

(Days Without Answers in a Narrow Space, National Catholic Reporter, Feb. 2002)

What can further hinder this birthing process is the fact that these darker emotions and experiences are no strangers as such, but they are mostly seen as enemies that has to be conquered or avoided. The sad part is that much of religion has played a big part in this approach. Matthew Fox in his book Original Blessing puts it as follows:

“Religion too has become very light-oriented in the West. The religion of Positivism is almost all light. And the sentimental hymns that ignore the dark or reduce it anthropomorphically to human sin and therefore to salvation contribute to the excessive lighting of our world.

What price have we paid as people for all this light? We have become afraid of the dark. Afraid of no light. Of silence, therefore. Of image-lessness. We whore after more – more images, more light, more profits, more goodies. And, if [Meister] Eckhart is correct about the power of subtraction versus the power of addition, our souls in the process shrivel up. For growth of the human person takes place in the dark. Under ground. In subterranean passages. There, where 'no image has ever reached into the soul's foundation,' God alone works. A light-oriented spirituality is superficial, surface-like, lacking as it does the deep, dark roots that nourish and surprise and ground the large tree.”

Therefore, if we do not want to shrivel up we have to be stretched. If we truly want to be people of the Light, we have to enter into the darkness and see it as gift. 

Along with befriending our strange companions on our journey it is important to get to know and become comfortable with paradox as well. More about that tomorrow.

George

Also see the post Study in dark