Finding Our True Home and Healing Sanctuary in
Christ
"Come to me, all you who are heavy burdened
and I will give you rest….Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.; for I am
gentle and humble of heart and you will find rest for your souls." Matt.
11:28
Our invitation from Yeshua is
to find our home, our root, our rest in Him. All of us at some time in this world of impermanence ask the
question, "Where is our true home?" In my own story early in my life
we had to move often as a consequence of great financial insecurity. My mother
says that I often asked as young child, "Is that where we are going to
live?" This same insecurity carried into adult life. I have longed to find
the home and sanctuary where I can always rest, where I can always belong,
where I can always have worth and dignity, where I can always have safety and
security, where I can we always know who I truly am and live that truth. For me the answer to these questions is
at the core of the Christian mystery. The Heart of Christ is an ontological
reality already within us. The Heart of Christ is a truth to be discovered and
lived. His Invitation is to live our lives consciously and intentionally in his
Heart. In the Gospel of John He
says "Abide in my love."
I take Him at His word that His heart is my home, and I can dwell there
in a sanctuary that is neither conditional nor temporary. So much of the way we
live is conditional, dependent on external circumstances for getting along or
making a living. We make the necessary adjustments and negotiations in order to
survive, in order to have some semblance of safety and security in this life,
in order to be acceptable. That set of arrangements is necessary. The problem arises
when we believe the set of arrangements and adjustments we make and the face we
show to the world that we call "self" is who we are, is our true
abode. We are wandering pilgrims in this life without a home until we
discover and anchor our lives in the Heart of Christ.
Yeshua tells us that union in
Him is the promise of the Way of the Heart. (John 14:20) "On that Day you will know that I am in my
Father and my Father in me, and you in me and I in you.” Today, each day, can be “that day.”
Christ is the central Reality of our inner Life. Unitive Life in Christ is an
ontological truth which we are invited to live, to make real in our
humanity. In John 15:5, Yeshua
says, “I am the vine you are the branches.” In this passage we see that the
fullness of Christ, the Pleroma of the Word made Flesh, has the potential to be
realized in our human person. This is not another human arrangement, another
negotiated relationship, another "deal" we work out for our benefit.
It is simply the way things are; it is not earned but pure gift. The heart of
our own heart is the Heart of Christ, waiting to be fully incarnate in our
human person, Christ consciousness brought forth in our own human consciousness
as we spoke of in Chapter Four.
John 1:1- "In the
beginning was the Word.. all things came into being through Him... What has
come into being is Life and the Life is the Light of all people. " In this passage the Gospel says again that the
ontological truth of our being is that we come into life in Christ and whether
we are awakened to it or not, He is our true Light. Thomas Kelly, in his beautify essay, "The Light
Within" says that our inner Light is Christ. And in the Way of the Heart
we come to express His Light, not in spite of, but through all of our wounds
and brokenness, through the raw material of our incarnate humanity. We become
the vessel and the lit flame of the Light of Christ. In this way we bring the
totality of our life experiences, need, and vulnerability to the Divine
Christos, the Life of our Heart, and in the love of Christ it is redeemed and
brought to the fullness of life's true purpose.
In our interior life of
communion with Christ He draws all things unto Himself. Life experienced in our
humanity is brought into the Light and Redemptive Love of Christ, and
transformed. Our humanity is not to be rejected or disdained or shamed, but
brought to the altar as the broken bread to be lifted up and consecrated. What
was knotted is set free, what was twisted is made straight, what was injured is
healed. All is redeemed, and brought to its rightful purpose in the Heart of
Christ. We experience then in our transformative spiritual practice, an
interior circulation, an alchemy of Love, where all is brought to its rightful
purpose in the Heart of Christ.
What was seen before as deficit becomes strength. So many persons have
discovered that what brought them down and injured them and others in life
becomes redeemed strength. In the moment when we say 'yes' to Christ, and make
of our humanity an offering, it becomes the moment of transformation. We bow
and we offer ceaselessly.
Christ Our Safety and
Security
In my own early life there
was great insecurity and a life of being moved from place to place and at times
periods of homelessness. And it is
this wound of insecurity that has been the engine of my own spiritual journey
to find a Home where I wouldn't have to leave, where I would always be welcome,
where I would eternally belong. All of us need a place of ultimate safety and
healing to abide and take refuge. Yeshua
says that His Heart is our true home. And I believe Him. When we stop relying
on the conditional survival adjustments and arrangements as the source of our
ultimate Faith, and instead anchor our life ultimately in the unconditioned
Love of Christ, then we begin to experience true Home, and true Peace and true
Love. We can continue to live in the conditional world but we can stop making
compromises with the primacy of the Love of Christ and the truth of our
communion in Him. When we do this we find the courage to bring forth what is
truest and best in us as gift to the world.
The purpose of a silent
immersion retreat in Prayer of the Heart is to settle in to a deep place of
interior safety and sanctuary in Christ. In this place of safety, in this sanctuary
in our own heart, we become accessible to communion with Christ. We open and release the knotted and
wounded aspects of our life. Intensive experience with Prayer of the Heart
practice opens us and makes us accessible to the Heart and Love of Christ in a
deeper way than we thought possible. In the Prayer of the Heart intensive
retreat we come to release from the worries, wounds, and confusion of our life
to abide and heal in the Heart of Christ.
What is abiding? One way to
see this might be as "anchoring" in both our attention and intention
in the core and ground of Ultimate Reality, rather than being carried along in
the confusion and distraction of what is "normal" consciousness for
most people. Abiding in Christ is also
"anchoring" in our practice. In order to be accessible to this
"anchoring" in Christ as our true home and reality we do our praxis
of Breathing Yeshua, bowing in presence and adoration, and offering in love to
Christ. In the Way of the Heart this grounding and anchoring happens through
the "Invocation of the Holy Name," to come Home, again and again. For
Christians the name of the Holy One is Yeshua, the face of God turned towards
us. The ancients of the desert called this continual return the praxis of the
"Remembrance" of God.
The need for salvation arises
from our homelessness, and our wandering and seeking in all the wrong places.
The practice is to look for love in the right place, and home is right here,
right now, within us. The Good News is that God in Christ is accessible to us,
The only impediment to our always being Home in communion with Christ is our
receptivity, our being accessible. As God is pure gift then the real issue is
being accessible. "I am here, I am ready for You, to receive You, to
'live' Your Life in mine." To be accessible we offer all that we are, all
that we have lived, all that we intend and will to be, in the praxis of
attention/adoration and intention/self-giving love.
We make our self-offering
without exception, without shame, without self-judgement, and in utter trust.
The Gospel stories teach us metaphorically that being accessible to Yeshua
involves stretching and reaching beyond the familiar patterns and known limits.
Healing in the Gospel stories must involve stretching out the hand in
trust, asking to be being "lowered through the roof" in utter
humility. And we reach out like the hemorrhaging woman to touch the garment.
These
acts of Faith, and not magic, Yeshua tells us, are what makes the healing
possible. And so it is in Faith we are accessible to Him and His touch within
us. In a retreat space or in the consecrated space of our daily practice we
enter into an act of giveness and trust where unconditioned Life is offered to
us. We make ourselves accessible by stepping out of known and familiar patterns
of the mind traffic and the arrangements it has made, to anchor into the
Mystery of communion in Christ in our own Heart. Like the paralytic
lowered through the roof to be healed, we lower ourselves into intimacy with
Christ in our own hearts in the interior quiet of Breathing Yeshua, and we
receive the touch of healing Love. In His touch we find our home, in His touch
we find our healing.
.
In this exercise of pure
Faith we open to transformative healing, and our life's salvation in Christ.
The healing of fear brings forth courageous Love. The healing of shame and
unworthiness brings forth the dignity and reverence of Love. The healing of
isolation and rejection brings forth the communion and belonging of Love. The
healing of spiritual blindness brings forth the clarity and awakening of Love.
The healing of a divided life brings forth wholehearted and consecrated Love.
My Healed Journey with Dad
The journey I have walked
with my father the last 20 years has been blessed by this same healing touch of
Christ. My father and I started out badly in life. He returned from World War
II a deeply damaged young man who had undergone the worst of combat and the
turmoil of an alcoholic upbringing. Being terribly injured by a drunk driver
and in a hospital for several months didn't help in his prognosis for having a
happy family life. My mother and father divorced when I was two years old. The
father I knew growing up was not someone I wanted to be with. Through grace, religious Faith, and
Alcoholics Anonymous he began to do the inner work necessary to be a man
capable of love. With the inner work I was doing in contemplative prayer
practice we found a way to walk together and discover the love we could have as
father and son in later life. In April 2004 I was at his bedside and he passed
from this life into the joy of Christ. He had told me that his greatest
happiness would be to see Yeshua face to face. I was graced to be present when
that moment happened and I felt his joy.
Our journey of healing began
when we decided to have an annual retreat together at the Trappist Monastery of
Our Lady of Guadalupe in Oregon. It was the monastery where my spiritual
mentor, Abbot Bernard McVeigh O.C.S.O. resided. In the years that followed my
father and I grew to become best friends and shared the love that two men who
are good friends can have. This love and healing only became possible out of
the growing experience of abiding in Christ and bringing our wounds to the Love
that heals all and redeems all. Sometimes an entire redemptive movement of
Christ's healing touch in a life can be best summed up in a moment. I wrote a
poem in 1994 to describe such a
moment.
Walking
down Abbey Road
by William Ryan
Two men tread the silence and communion along Abbey
Road.
Their vapored breath rises toward a grey winter
sky.
This way they come now eight years,
when the sun slants just so.
They have held and heard,
each the other moan,
and lanced the festering wounds of grief.
One foot bathes in wellspring of Living Water
within,
the other wrenches in pain.
One father crying out for the son he lost in
divorce,
the other, the boy he lost in the wasting of
leukemia.
It will never be.
The one man injured his mind,
lost his innocence,
and his soul was bloodied,
in the killing of Bloody Nose ridge,
on that
distant Palau island, Pelilu.
Alcoholism took the rest, almost.
The other, now grey too, recovers from wounds,
a casualty of the suicides,
broken lives and suffering of
the psychiatric trenches.
Father and son no more,
Now two old friends,
telling tales of love and passion,
round the corner and ascend the hill
of Guadalupe.
They stride arm over shoulder.
The winter ray strikes through the clouds
the outstretched white marble arms
of
welcoming Savior.
He beckons all, takes all unto Himself.
The Living Spring breaks through the weary crust,
In timelessnes, can it be any other way?
" All will be well, All be well,
And all manner of things will be well."
