The Holy Unpredictable

“These long months and years were leading me where I could not have predicted.”

Henri Nouwen

Life unfolds in so many strange and unexpected ways.  

When we are in the first stages of life, it can seem as if all is under our own control. If we work hard at this or that, surely life will turn out as we hope, want, and plan.  And when things eventually turned out as planned, happiness and contentment will surely follow.  But even while I needed this kind of hope when I was younger, to make my way in the world, not all of me felt this way.  Deeper down uneasiness, anxiety, and shame had always broken through into the hope, making me feel like I was failing, that things were about to fall apart. 

It has taken such a long time, a lifetime of work, to find some freedom from this illusion of self-control, the self-imprisonment of shame, the fear of failure. But necessary work without which I/we surely would become more brittle, closed, and imprisoned as we age. The kind of hope we need during the first half of life, that our efforts will consistently make things permanently better for ourselves and our world, that happiness, like love and belonging, is some kind of fixed state that we will eventually reach, that one day we will no longer fail, will in the second and third stages of life become beliefs that imprison and sicken us, keeping us from living vitally, creatively, compassionately, and more generously in the world.  Our gifts and light, as the bible tells it, will remain under a bushel, hidden from a world in desperate need of more aged wisdom and love. 

Life itself has given me the lessons I have needed to cede control and enter what is the dance and rhythm of life’s unfolding. Each apparent ‘failure’ has in some way, and after enough time has passed, become an invitation to be shaped into a more loving, creative, generous person. The gifts of transformation come not through my own self-effort or merit on my part alone but solely through an unbidden gift from the universe, through others, nature, God/Divine soul itself.  My part has been the consent given to God to be transformed.

What resonates in me from the Christian contemplation tradition, alongside contemplative yoga practice, is the experience of the Divine God in collaboration with us in this journey of love, self-discovery, and the dismantling of our self-made prisons of fear, shame, and disconnection.  When we quiet our minds enough to sink into the deepest depths of our being, into a union with the divine (Ishvara Pranidana), this presence is there reaching out to support and love us, helping us to become more than we could be on our own  - the image and likeness of divine love in the world. 

I come to this kind of knowing through experiential bodily knowing, a felt-sense of it and upon reflection on how my life has unfolded in ways I could not have planned, predicted, or made happen by my own self-effort of will.  Each apparent failure was never an end point – a point of departure from my plan yes –but also a threshold into renewal, growth, and deepening of the experience of being alive.