There may have been times when your life has been going along well enough that you didn’t notice that you had lost it. But as soon as struggle appears, with all its intense and often negative emotions, you most likely realized that you were lacking something, but you probably didn’t know what it was, let alone how to find it.
You may even have tried to find it. You might have gone to a therapist. You might have gone to worship. You might have picked up and started to read the scripture of your tradition. That might have helped some, but somehow you knew it was not getting you to where you wanted and needed to be.
You had a spiritual center in the womb. You basked in the warmth and love that surrounded you. You also were in touch with your spiritual center after you were born. You knew you were surrounded with love and people who really wanted to meet your every need.
But then something happened. Something that made you wonder if you really could trust the people around you and the world that enfolded you. And once that happened, things began to unravel quickly. As the days and months and years passed by, you had all kinds of feelings that fought against your spiritual center. You felt anger. You became suspicious. You were no longer sure the world was a safe place for you.
You felt remorse for things you had done and said. You were angry at others, and knew you should forgive them, but just couldn’t. You felt shame, that strange and permeating emotion that leads us to feel we just don’t quite measure up, we are not quite good enough.
When you were in the womb, you lived in the present. You weren’t obsessed with the past or what might happen in the future. You basked in life as it came to you. You trusted life as it came to you.
Now, you seldom live in the present. You fret over the past, and can’t quite get beyond the wrongs that were done to you. You still feel hurt by what your father said or didn’t say to you. Psychologists say that over half of grown men are still trying to please their fathers, long after they are gone. You remember the fights you had with your mother. You remember the unkind things you said to her, and the ways she may have hurt you.
The future is even worse. You don’t live in the present because you have so many things to worry about. Will we have enough money? Who will win the next election? Will my health hold up? Will I get Covid19, or will someone I love get it? Will I ever have grandchildren? Will there be enough rain for the crops this year? Will I ever find a good job? With all the cutbacks going on, will I lose my job? It is not that these things are not important. Some are life or death. But, as Jesus, said: “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” [Matthew 6:27]
Even when you are Facetiming your family or your friends, you think of the ways you failed them, you feel anxiety about their futures. You have trouble really listening to them right now, and hearing what they are saying, and feeling their love.
When we lose our spiritual center, we have difficulty living in the present, and thereby we lose our grounding, our secure center, our ability to give and receive forgiveness, our ability to give and receive love.
When we lose our spiritual center, we forget what we each know deep down in our hearts: that love is, in the end, the only thing that matters. Love is what we want, what we need, and--as hard as it is to believe--love is surrounding us and available each moment of life, making it possible to live joyously in the present. St. Paul said, “Now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” And every religious tradition I know of says the same, in one way or another.
Spiritual writer, Mirabai Starr, explains:
The sacred scriptures of all faiths call us to love as we have never loved before. This requires effort, vigilance, and radical humility. Violence is easier than nonviolence, yet hate only perpetuates hate. The wisdom teachings remind us that love—active, engaged, fearless love—is the only way to save ourselves and each other from the firestorm of war that rages around us. There is a renewed urgency to this task now. We are asked not only to tolerate the other, but also to actively engage the love that transmutes the lead of ignorance and hatred into the gold of authentic connection. This is the “narrow gate” Christ speaks of in the Gospels [Matthew 7:13]. Don’t come this way unless you’re willing to stretch, bend, and transform for the sake of love.
Your spiritual center is God in you, connecting you through love with all the world. That center is filled with everything we need to live joyously in the present: forgiveness, trust, hope, reconciliation, love. There we can let the past go, and there we do not have to worry about the future. There we can find peace of mind and peace of spirit, every day of our lives.
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| Etty Hillesum, 1914-1943 |
What and where is your spiritual center? No one put it better than Etty Hillesum, killed at Auschwitz in 1943:
There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too … And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.
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