Keller, Tillich, Lamott: Faith, Doubts

Keller, Tillich, Lamott: Faith, Doubts

“Observers in the full enjoyment of their bodily senses pity me, but it is because they do not see the golden chamber in my life where I dwell delighted; for, dark as my path may seem to them, I carry a magic light in my heart. Faith, the spiritual strong searchlight, illumines the way, and although sinister doubts lurk in the shadow, I walk unafraid towards the Enchanted Wood where the foliage is always green, where joy abides, where nightingales nest and sing, and where life and death are one in the Presence of the Lord.”

Helen Keller, Midstream: My Later Life

How beautifully Helen Keller describes faith. Someone who is blind describes faith as light, a light in her heart. She also does not negate doubt. The words of Paul Tillich which Ann Lamott has popularized ring in my ears, “The opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty.” Faith implies believing in something or being in relationship with something that is a mystery, that is not defined by our human understanding.

Our rational minds can just take us so far in understanding faith.

When a person has difficulty with mystery, doubts move in. Our doubts can be stepping stones to a deeper faith as we read and share our doubts with others and learn and experience the mystery together.

I so often speak with spiritual friends about doubt and reassure them that this is not unnatural or the enemy or unhealthy. I tell friends, “Let ‘s talk about the doubts. If you come to a place of unbelief, let me carry your faith, until you are ready to take it back. I am counting on you to do the same for me, when doubts overcome me.”

Joanna joannaseibert.com

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harding: change

Esther Harding: Change

“We cannot change anyone else; we can change only ourselves, and then usually only when the elements that are in need of reform have become conscious through their reflection in someone else.”

M. Esther Harding, The “I” and the “Not-I”, A Study in the Development of Consciousness, from Inwardoutward.org

Esther Harding was a British American Jungian analyst who is considered to be the first significant Jungian Analyst in this country. Her 1975 first book, The Way of All Women, was one of the first books I read as I first tried to connect to a feminine spirituality.

President Jimmy Carter wrote this year about getting to the place where we can give thanks for our difficulties. That is almost impossible, but I can see his reasoning a little more clearly in Esther Harding’s writings. We wear our character defects and self-centeredness like an old bathrobe that is ugly and tattered but comfortable and a known entity, because this manner of life has become our known identity. We can only come to see these defects so glaringly in someone else as we are repulsed by the behavior pattern in others, and finally may realize this is the way we live as well. Our behavior and reaction to the world is what is keeping us from our connection to God.

I continually am amazed how God uses everything, everything to bring us back to God’s love, to connect to the God within us and within our neighbor. We find out what is blocking us from God’s love by first seeing it in someone else and realizing how unbeautiful it is. At some point, when it is the right time, I can share Harding’s insights with spiritual friends who also are suffering. I, as well, have spiritual friends who listen to me when suffering brings awareness which opens up a crack of light into my own life.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Merton: Spiritual Direction

Thomas Merton and spiritual direction

“The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God’s will and his grace.” Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayers

Thomas Merton’s concise book, Spiritual Direction and Meditation, is another excellent one for someone to read who wants to know what spiritual direction is all about. It is often recommended to spiritual friends before meeting about direction for the first time. It should also be a frequent reread for those giving spiritual direction. Merton reminds us that spiritual direction is not psychotherapy, and that directors should not become amateur therapist. He recommends that directors not concern themselves with unconscious drives and emotional problems. They should refer.

Merton’s sections on meditations are classic, straight forward, and practical. He uses the story of the Prodigal Son to serve as a model for meditation, as the son “entered into himself”, meditated on his condition starving in a distant land, far from his father. Merton also suggests the Incarnation, the birth of God into human form, as another meditation where we relate to the birth events within our own spiritual life.

Merton emphasizes the importance of holy leisure, believing that meditation should not be work, remembering that it will take time. He reminds us of promising artists who have been ruined by a premature success, which drove them to overwork in order to renew again and again the image of themselves created in the public mind. An artist who is wise contemplates more about what he paints than he puts to canvas and a poet who respects his art burns more than what he publishes.

In the interior life we must allow intervals of silent transitions in our prayer life. Merton reminds us of the words of St. Theresa, “God has no need of our works. God has need of our love.” The aim of our prayer life is to awaken the Holy Spirit within us so that the Holy Spirit will speak and pray within us. Merton believes that in contemplative prayer we learn about God more by love than by knowledge. Our awaking is brought on not by the actions of ourselves but by the work of the Holy Spirit.

Merton also cautions us about what he calls informal or colloquial “comic book spirituality” which flourishes in popular religion literature where Mary becomes Mom and Joseph is Dad and we “just tell them all about ourselves all day long.” This may be a helpful path to God for some, but it was not Merton’s path.

Joanna joannaseibert.com