Seekers
All
“In a
wide variety of cultures, God has become unmediated and local,
animating the natural world and human activity in profoundly intimate
ways...What was once reserved for a few saints has now become the
quest of millions around the planet—to be able to touch, feel, and
know God for oneself.”
Diana
Butler Bass (Grounded: Finding God in the World A Spiritual
Revolution)
Long ago, Saints and
Seers like Teresa of Avila, Joan of Ark, St. John of the Cross, and
Black Elk had visions and experiences that led them to believe in the
immediacy of the sacred, human contact with divine beings, and direct
and personal instructions from that which we call God. Before that, dozens of Old Testament prophets and kings had direct
and on-going relationships with Yahweh. I think of Samuel, who heard
God calling his name, Moses who listened to God from a burning bush,
Joseph who correctly interpreted the dreams of the Pharaoh, Isaiah
who more than once had to hide in caves to escape the wrath of the
people because he had faithfully delivered Yahweh's message to them.
New Testament figure, Saul, later called Paul, was struck blind on
the road to Damascus, reportedly by the spirit of the ascended Jesus,
who asked him directly to stop persecuting his followers. These
stories, we tell and retell, but until now, we believed they only
happened to special people—chosen people.
Nowadays, as the churches
and synagogues empty out, people are moving away from reading about
and studying other people's accounts of direct contact with the
divine, and seeking their own. The means of that search is as
individual as the people who embark on it. Drumming circles, sweat
lodges, a variety of forms of meditation, sacred dance, chant-like
praise, centering prayer, walking the labyrinth, yoga, and, in a
million different ways, contact with, and immersion in, the natural
world. It is as though, the more mechanized and technological we
humans become, the more we seek out the sacred in personal and
individual ways. We seem to be balancing our increasingly heady work,
with a deep desire to sit with the sacred. I think this change is
evolutionary.
Humans, as far as we
know, are the only species who have consistently sought to relate to
something that we perceive to be greater than ourselves. From our cave
days until now, that has never diminished; it has only evolved. That
singularity may be because the rest of the animal kingdom is so
connected to its source that there is no need to search, or it may be
because of the unlimited nature of our ever curious cerebral cortex.
Whatever the source, we humans have it. We seek, we knock, we
question, we experience. One wonders where it will lead in the next
hundred years.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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