Morning Pages

No scripture today, just an epiphany.

I have been feeling out of touch with the Spirit lately, so yesterday morning I had some time to sit quietly after my morning meditation and do some Bible reading, but it was flat, felt disconnected, no sense of the veil lifting for a peek at Mystery. Maybe it's because I am still in the middle of the Holiness Code in Numbers, which is a pretty sure cure for insomnia, but it felt like something else was in the way. So I utilized a tool which Julia Cameron writes about in The Artist's Way called "Morning Pages". This involves writing 3 or more pages first thing in the morning without thinking about it, just writing as fast as I can write whatever comes into my mind. This usually connects me with whatever is going on inside, whatever might be blocking me or keeping me stuck.

So I wrote some pages, and I connected with what was really going on for me in all its emotional messiness and unpleasantness. I am having feelings of stuckness and depression; of anger, mostly at myself for not handling things better; of hopelessness and despair; of self-loathing and judgment about my own inadequacies and failures; of enmeshment and feeling sucked back into the swamp: icky, yucky feelings that I hate feeling and will find about 100 ways to distract myself from. The thing is, by the time I was finished writing, I was feeling connected and engaged, galvanized is one word I used, energized, full of the Spirit, and then I can hear God's voice in the Silence, I can feel the urgings of the Spirit pushing me forward.

God meets me where I AM, but I have to be there, because that's where God dwells, in the moment as it truly is, not in the moment as I wish it were, or as I'm pretending it to be, as in, "I'm fine, everything's all right." A friend used the phrase "beside myself", and I never really saw it before in such a palpable way, but it really captures the essence of how I experienced that moment. If I am "beside myself" (or above or outside or whatever), I am not really connected to who and what I am IN THIS MOMENT. If I shut the door to the truth then I shut the door to God, too; God is still there, but I have closed off my access to God, shut God out when I cut myself off from what's really going on for me, that is, who I really am in any given moment. What's required is to stop and be, to remake those connections, to allow myself to experience the fullness of who I am including all the sticky, icky, unpleasant, vulnerable, shame-filled parts and places in me. If I do that, if I accept all that unpleasant and unhappy humanness of me, the surprising news is that's where I find God, where I perhaps might least expect it.

Prayer: Dear God, Thank you for the insight of your Divine Presence and for Your full acceptance of who I am. You accept me more than I accept myself! Help me stay connected to that flawed human side of me and to recognize it in others, so that I may touch them with Your love and acceptance as You have touched me. Amen.