Knocking on Heaven's Door

 

 

Imagine you are sitting alone in the middle of a well-lit room.  As you sit there alone in silence, the light in the room slowly begins to dim.  As the room dims, a light on the other side of the wall you are facing slowly becomes brighter and brighter.  You begin to realize that the wall you are facing is not really a solid wall, as you had imagined, but is rather a gossamer veil that is becoming increasingly translucent in the light that is shining through it, filling the darkness of your room with an unfamiliar light.

James Finley, The Healing Path

 

God, the divine presence, the deepest innermost self, can seem distant from us.  Even though God’s presence and belovedness lives within us, we can be cut off from this presence through trauma, loss, betrayal. Our hearts become hardened by the thick skins we layer around them so we might not feel the pain of our wounds. Healing comes as we allow the layers around the heart to dissolve little by little through self-compassion, surrender, and love. When this happens, we can begin to see the light of divine presence on the other side of those self-made interior walls that holds us in tenderness, sustenance, and love even amidst our troubles and catastrophes. 

 

Spiritual practices including asana, meditation, contemplative prayer give us the courage and faith to open our hearts up to what we habitually keep hidden and abandoned inside.  Feeling what we are most afraid of paradoxically can be the entryway into and through a tender heart to the inner divine presence.  I have experienced this fear as a feeling of groundlessness as if I am physically falling.  What I usually hold onto for comfort, the things, accomplishments, or relationships I use to prop myself up, are falling away.  They are too small to contain what is transforming and unfolding.  In this process, the interior walls keeping me separated from God begin to dissolve. So in the midst of fear and anxiety I can sometimes feel the inner lift of a presence holding me even in the freefall. It is like having wings.  The ground is still gone but I am flying now not falling.

 

I am becoming more accustomed to the feeling of groundlessness as I learn about the impermanence of everything in life. And how the call to grow is the call to live on the edge of the unknown.  I am learning to reinterpret this fear of the unknown as an invitation to meet myself more deeply, to reclaim the parts I have abandoned or shunned for so long, and to draw closer to the effulgent inner light.

 

The mystics tell us then when we die God draws us close like metal shavings to a magnet into a singular oneness.  And also that we don’t have to wait until we die to find that kind of intimacy.  Through our spiritual practices of devotion, calming the scattered mind, self-reflection, selfless service, we might before death be fitted with angel’s wings.