God
Within
“Spirituality
is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away
from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world.
Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomever we
may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.”
Meister
Eckhart
When we are troubled in
body or spirit, we sometimes pray for healing, or for relief from
pain or illness. When good things happen, we pray in gratitude and
give thanks for God's grace. The question is, who are we praying to?
Where is the one to whom we pray? For thousands of years, we have
prayed to a God that we assume to be outside ourselves. And not only
outside ourselves, but far away; above us, wherever heaven is
presumed to be. We are by now, hard-wired to think of God as
other and apart from us. We have externalized God to the point that
we cannot get away from the image of “God, the father” and
“heaven” as being (a) masculine and (b) outside ourselves and
apart from our everyday world.
Can you see how this has
led us to marginalize females and the environment? I wonder how many
of us still see that which we call Divine as being masculine and
apart from us? What if we were to work at changing this understanding
of the Holy. What if we were to begin to see the divine as being
within—both within ourselves and others, and within all of
creation. Right here in this world, on this planet, in all people, in
all places. God the father, God the mother, God the bird, the tree,
the waterfall, the porcupine, the aardvark, the singing kettle, the
frying eggs. What if we were to internalize God and pray to the God
within us and within all things. Would that change the way we view
others and change our very common everyday experience in this world?
Meister Eckhart, a
thirteenth century monk, already knew this. But we have lost it and
that has allowed us to marginalize people who are different form us,
and to abuse the earth. What if, every time a piece of garbage was thrown on the street, we felt we were disrespecting sacred ground? Or
every time we disparage a woman for being not up to our standards of
beauty, we instead saw her as our sister, our beloved. What if we
understood that pouring pesticides over our grass kills the very
insects that we rely upon to pollinate the food we eat, and the food
that all creatures eat. Those insects are doing Divine work. Wouldn't
this be a better way to understand the importance of the world?
When you pray, pray to
the Divine within—within you, and within this beautiful world. God
is here among us. God is the life force that holds the cosmos
together—all beings and all of the created order share God's
brilliance. Let's begin to understand that like Meister Eckhart did
seven hundred years ago.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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