Divine
Friendship
“For
prayer is nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God.”
St.
Teresa of Avila
In one
of her videos, Caroline Myss speaks about the tendency toward, “I’m on my
own spirituality.” She describes this as an attitude: “God may or may
not exist; heaven is an option; I will use the power of my mind and will to
make my own choices.” And then she recounts the experiences of some of the
mystics—St. Teresa being one of them—who had full blown encounters with the Divine
that were beyond their ability to describe. According to Myss, we are not yet
equipped with the language that can express the ineffable, but the message is
clearly this: “The unity of all life is a fact. It all breathes together as
one soul.”
You can
imagine simply from this description just how far we are from exemplifying the Divine.
Just the idea that we are all one causes us to get our hackles up. So that is
our evolutionary task—to get to the point in human existence where we realize,
not just intellectually, but with our whole being, that we are not separate.
That we exist within a unity and not as individuals. We might visualize
ourselves as cells within a body—we may differentiate in purpose but to create
the whole we must work together. A liver cell has a different function from a
brain cell, for instance, but neither can be effective without the other. Our
bodies are living systems, and we are too, only we exist on a cosmic level. It
takes all of us working together, enacting our different functions, to make one
healthy whole. The key to healing either body or society, then, is unity.
Myss
also describes the relationship of individuals to the Divine, which is not
apart from us but always present. It is, as St. Teresa said, one of intimate
friendship. Instead of expecting a super-hero savior to burst onto the scene
and clean things up for us, we must do our part to move ourselves forward while
asking for assistance. “Help me to understand what I should do next. I know
I must work my way through this mess, but I need your help. So, download some
grace right now!” That’s how Caroline Myss prays—like she’s talking to a partner,
a co-creator.
Most of
all, if we want to heal ourselves and our country, which is at this moment
devastated by division and by coronavirus, we must become “vessels of unity.”
Like the cells of our bodies, when we don’t function together, illness is the
result. Let us pray for unity—within ourselves and for our world.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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