Open Circle

 

A recent discussion with a spiritual director gave me the chance to explore how my irritation and impatience with people covers a tender longing for deeper connection.  I have a picture of how I want to be connected with another or with a group.  There is a longing to be seen, accepted, and even cherished.  I want to be a celebrated guest! And there is also a longing to reciprocate this love and cherishing, to celebrate the gifts, wonder, and life of another.  I long for there to be no friction between me and my beloveds. When the experience of relationships falls short of my longings, as they necessarily will given how unrealistic my expectations are, I can feel letdown, marginalized, ignored.  I can feel angry at the person or group who has ‘let me down’ and ashamed of myself for wanting too much, for being selfish and ungrateful. Suffering from a feeling ‘not enoughness’ in these relationships, there is an urge to withdraw from engaging and participating. 

But something is shifting in my perception of things. And this has come as an amazing grace, to be given a window into a different perspective of relationships, longing, and belonging. The shift is in seeing how the experience of ‘not enoughness’, unfulfillment and abandonment in relationships comes from me and not the other. The longing to be completed by another, protected, and even saved is interwoven into the core of our being.  As the mystics have written, our creator made us with a hole in our hearts.  We search to fill it with the things of life including people.  Yet this is an emptiness that can only be filled by the yearning for God, for Oneness, for meaning beyond our small individual selves. 

Another way of saying this is that in the circle of all belonging, the point is free. There will necessarily be space between us that cannot be filled.  We cannot save each other so much as walk beside and with and this will sometimes feel like friction, disconnection, emptiness.  This is also how God is with us.  In the circle of our belonging the point is free.  We would not know our separate selves without this freedom.  We would otherwise remain like babes in the womb never knowing ourselves as separate from our creator. 

In this understanding, I see how our longings (my longing), so intimate and unique, held in tender hope and vulnerability, the very thing that makes us feel so separate, are also the thresholds on which we all walk.  This unites us in this mystery of life.  We can come to know that we are both separate and together, not only the small wave but a part of the greater ocean of living.  And in this way find ourselves together in our separateness.