"It is not I who live but Christ who lives in me.

This life I now live, I live by faith in Jesus,

who loved me and gave his life for me." Galatians 2:20
 

Have you ever had that surprising and utterly mysterious realization that you ‘are,’ that you exist? Have you ever just held the radical sense of amazement: "I am!"? The moments when we are consciously aware of ‘being’ are windows into our souls, inviting us into an ever-deepening experience of our true nature.

We often treat such words and phrases as ‘Being,’ ‘I am,’ ‘soul,’ and ‘true nature’ with a distancing deference and leave them to the lofty pursuits of academic philosophy, theology, and psychology. What with busy schedules, contract deadlines, messages to return, kids to bus from place to place, and exhaustingly full days, people hear these words and think that they have no time for the luxury of such exploration.

In fact, these words and phrases are not burdensome concepts and elements of intellectual curiosity. It’s not as if we must trudge through the dense pages of Heidegger’s weighty tomes. On the contrary, when attended to as we attend our summer gardens, they bear the hearty fruits of self-understanding and heart-full gratitude. With care and nurture, they are the spiritual portals to inner peace, abundant life, meaning and purpose, and, ultimately, to the realization of our true nature.

The Psalmist captured the essence of true nature when he wrote, "It was you, God, who created my inmost self, wove me together in my mother’s womb…." Your inmost being, your soul, is the handiwork of God.

There is a rich paradox in all of this. We are chips off the ol’ Divine block, so to speak, in that we are both the granite and the chisel that shapes the granite. When we place our lives -- the granite -- and "who we are" -- the chisel -- in God’s trust, the development of our being continues as creatively and fully as when we were in our mother’s wombs.
 

Our true nature is that:

• we are the containers for the essence of God; and

• we are each unique but we are each created in the image of God, and

• exist in union with God.

Please sit with the following phrase for a few moments, but first

relax and breathe in gently and out softly….

breathe in God, breathe out the tension in your body, breathe in Spirit,

breathe out any burden, fear, or anxiety that you carried into the church this morning, breathe in God’s presence …. as you hear the phrase:

Repeat the phrase, paying attention to how your body reacts ……. and ……. where your mind goes with the words.

Most of us are active in church and practicing a variety of spiritual disciplines in varying degrees of intensity because we want to live our lives "in" God and in God’s presence. In spite of our crazy schedules and often off-center priorities, we want our faith to be dynamic, coherent, practiced, and meaningful. As we are more and more caught up in the sweep of crazy schedule/off-center priorities, we can miss the longing within us for a deep faith.

When we wake late in the night unable to sleep, if we will quiet our cluttered and restless minds, we will feel a spiritual vacuum, God’s absence. If we resist rushing to fill the absence-of-God-vacuum with our busyness and clutter we will have two experiences: first, we will feel what the Bible calls hungering and thirsting for God, our hearts restless for God; and second, our addiction to our busyness will be confronted by a genuine spiritual desire to welcome the One who "created our inmost self."

Faith, spirituality, and the experience of God are not linear. They are something like a meandering river. The channel cuts through the hardpan of the prairie, running swiftly in a wide, shallow cut – as what life feels like without God. In other topography the channel runs deeper and more purposefully, as a life moving toward God. The river comes to impenetrable outcroppings that are like the hard times in life or the cluttered backwash of the soul. Then the river cuts a fresh course -- as the soul would, feeling its longing-thirsting-hungering for God -- and the river moves resolutely with its currents through the countryside. The river finally pours itself to the ocean, just as the soul finally pours itself into the ocean of Divine love and presence.

Faith is a journey: sometimes we live without God until we listen to the void in our souls. Then we move toward God, mindful of hungering and thirsting, mindful of the restless heart. In this state of mindfulness we travel with God, our being turned toward God, our listening intent as we close the gap, feeling the nearness of God’s presence. The journey with God is the opening of souls – wider and wider – to the love of God. There comes a moment of union, integration, a non-dual state in which there is no separation between you and God. It is a fertile time of being fully receptive to the Spirit, completely united with the One who "created our inmost being." St. Paul captured what it means to live "in" God when he said, "It is not I who live but Christ who lives in me." Our true nature is to welcome the Divine Guest back into our inmost being.

We may spend a good deal of our lives stepping into the various currents of the river, journeying without, toward, with, and in God. Life is just that way. But when we finally go with the flow of the Spirit we turn the moments of "without God" into a whole life of union and presence, light and being, meaning and purpose, freedom and serenity, compassion and justice. We become what we were meant to become all along.
 

EXERCISE

Quieting ourselves, breathing gently:

• Settle-in and sense where you are right now in your relationship with God: today, are you mostly: without God, or moving toward God, or journeying with God, or are you living in God? Sit quietly and sense where you really are.

• And now, where does you soul most want to be in your relationship with God?

• In the quiet between your mind and soul, state to yourself your intention for moving from where you are presently to where you most want to be with God.

"And God said, ‘I will love you with an everlasting love.’"

The Psalmist wrote, "It was you, O God, who created my inmost self."

St. Paul wrote, "The knowledge that I have now is incomplete, but then love comes and I shall know as fully as I am known."

God grant us our intentions, fill our longing with your presence, be our light, life, and peace. In Christ’s name. Amen