A Taste of New Wine
October 21st, 2010
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by admin · Filed Under: Faith · Spiritual Health · healing · life
On the spiritual journey, it seems to me that we travel through three overarching phases.
The first is that of the seeker. There is a nudging from within, and a nagging feeling that there is something more to be discovered, so we start on the journey. We perhaps find confirmation and motivation in the words of Jesus, when he said, “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.” (Matt. 7:7-8)
Ravi Ravindra, author of Pilgrim Without Boundaries, wrote, “The struggle to know who I am, in truth and in spirit, is the spiritual quest. The movement in myself from the mask to the face, from the personality to the person, from the performing actor to the ruler of the inner chamber, is the spiritual journey. . . . To keep the flame of spiritual yearning alive is to be radically open to the present and to refuse to settle for comforting religious dogmas, philosophic certainties, and social sanctions.”
And, in the words of Thomas Merton:
“In one sense we are always traveling,
And traveling as if we did not know where
we were going.
In another sense we have already
arrived. . . .
But oh! How far have I to go to find
You in Whom I have already arrived!
“In another sense we have already arrived.” And the Spirit of God is knocking on the door of our mind, as it says in Revelation 3:20: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; . . .” It is we who have to open the door of our mind and heart, and “if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.”
Thus we move into the second phase of our spiritual journey, that of awakening.
Lorraine Kisly, editor-in-chief of Parabola magazine, says “. . . when a moment of awakening comes, it is clear that we are awakened. But to what? And for what? Pir Zia Inayat Khan makes a useful distinction for us. There are two types of awakening, one a sudden glimpse of hidden things which is pure gift and the other ‘a sustained inner capacity,’ an earned state.”
We are awakened to the Truth of God’s presence, the first type of awakening, the “sudden glimpse of hidden things which is pure gift.” Lorraine Kisly says that the gift comes to all without exception. It comes, as Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz tells us, as an “awareness of reality, awareness of something that is calling me, ‘Come closer, come closer.’”
The second type of awakening, “a sustained inner capacity,” an earned state, is more difficult, challenging.
Jesus describes the coming together of people into an understanding of God’s presence as a dinner party, a marriage feast. (Matt. 22:1-6) As you will recall, many were invited to the celebration, but not everyone chose to come. And that is true in our lives today, that not all of us choose to come to the celebration, and not all of us come to experience a heightened consciousness of the presence of God. We live in a mundane world and a mundane experience, so we do not come with open, receptive, and responsive minds.
Jesus said, in effect, that one of the hardest things to accept in our lives is a new idea. And he came to bring a new idea, a new idea of the kingdom of God that is available and accessible to us at all times. In fact, in the Gospel of Matthew, he reminded us of the words of Isaiah (6:9,10) when he said, “You shall indeed hear but never understand. You shall indeed see but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull and their ears are heavy of hearing. And their eyes have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts, and turn for me to heal them.” (Matt. 13:14-15)
In order to heal, we have to see with new eyes, we have to hear with new ears, and we have to feel with a new heart, a new openness of heart. That means changing, and this is one of the hardest things for us to do, to change. But in all the parables Jesus turns us around, and says that in order for something new to happen in your life you must change the way you look at your world, you must change the way you look at yourself. You must open your ears and your eyes and your heart to a new possibility that is already available to you, that is here now, and not sometime else but right here and right now.
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