| Dear Ann,
What are the central questions that drive you in your life? For me, the following two questions have been the most foundational in guiding my life's journey, and I have found that they are foundational questions for the interior integration journey as well:
1. How can I know and love God more deeply?
2. What does it mean to know and love God in the present reality I am in?
Living the Questions Opened Me Up More to God
I have learned that it is important that these questions are kept open ended and that I do not rush in my anxiety to find answers. For it is the questions themselves that open me to ever more newer and deeper encounters with the divine.
I was a couple of decades into living out the first question, “How can I know and love God more deeply?” before I realised that part of knowing and loving God was knowing and loving myself. And I realised that it was impossible to have a truly intimate relationship with God if I do not have a relationship with myself!
That realisation broke open a brand new horizon in my interior journey. Up to that point, I always thought that the entire point of the spiritual life was to “lose myself” and focus on God and what God wanted me to do. Because I knew God wanted me to love others, I also focused on serving others while hoping somehow that the emptiness I always felt inside me would be taken away “in reward” for my obedience to God.
To Love God I Needed to Love Myself
I was mistaken. God revealed to me that because he dwells within me, if I wish to know and love him, I need to learn how to know and love myself. A big part of that was learning how to let God love me instead of focusing on what it meant for me to love him. Why? Because I cannot give what I do not have.
The next step after realising I had to learn how to let God love me was to learn to experience being loved unconditionally by myself. Both of these lessons were harder than I expected, and I began to wonder why it was that letting myself BE LOVED was so difficult.
Gradually the Lord led me to the understanding that my humanity was deeply wounded and that my wounds needed healing before I could love and be loved freely and joyfully. Over many years the realisation deepened that what I needed was much more than spiritual healing and being “prayed over”, but that there were deep emotional and psychological wounds that required long-term, regular attunement and healing work.
How My Concrete, Present Reality Matters
It was during this season of my life that I realised it was important to also ask the second question - “What does it mean to know and love God in the present reality I am in?”
When we don’t contextualise the first question in the concrete reality that we find ourselves in, we often have an unforgiving and unrealistic expectation of what “love” should look like. For example, we expect ourselves to be able to love with the full freedom of our will, to be courageous and other-centred all the time without taking into consideration that our nervous systems and bodies are still frozen in anxiety due to trauma and that in such a state, the freedom of our will can be severely compromised.
Thus when we fail to act in the most virtuous and loving of ways, we judge ourselves harshly as if we had full knowledge and full freedom in what we chose - and so we struggle to have compassion for ourselves. Without our realisation, this can often lead us to judge others harshly as well.
**An Update**
As I continue to discern how I am called to know and love God in the present reality that I find myself in, I realise that I am also constantly called to refine and reshape my vocation and work to let these be more aligned with the person I am becoming more fully in Christ.
One of the outcomes of this ongoing discernment is my decision that Begin Again will now be sent out every 2 months instead of every month. (I will send out any time-sensitive news or important updates as separate emails.)
I recommend that you subscribe/follow me on the medium of your preference - Podcast, YouTube, Blog or Instagram - to receive timely updates on new content.
How About You?
My dear fellow interior pilgrim, what are the fundamental questions that guide your journey? Are you open to living those questions instead of anxiously trying to find the answers? Are you clinging on to old versions of you and outstaying commitments that no longer serve your authentic growth? Or are you open to discerning where the Holy Spirit is calling you to take risk and change so that you can become more fully who wholly who God has created you to be?
Journeying with you, |
