Liminality

Two weeks ago I ran into a huge paradox for myself: The darkness is comforting and scary. As I participated in a spiritual retreat, God shined light on the fact that I carry some woundedness towards other people. I carry bitterness, hatred, envy and jealousy. As much as I never thought I did, God shed light on the darkness of my soul and revealed to me what I didn’t know I was doing. I was wandering in the dark. I was living life from the place within me that forbid God to trespass. The world saw me one way but I was living in my heart a darker way. I convinced myself I was doing right and living well and covering a lot of ground but what I was really doing was training myself to become incapable of seeing the light. Honestly, there are people in this world I need to forgive. I don’t because it is easier for me to not shine light on that part of my soul. My dark soul is trained in carrying woundedness and is comfortable never having another person recognize it again. It...

When we don’t want to deal with something we mystify it. When we don’t want to think deeply about something we mystify it. When we never fight ambiguity or wrestle with contradictions we mystify them. If something presents itself as too scary to think about – we mystify it. We take all the confusion and uncertainty and bury them deep within our spirituality and say, “God is in control.” Mystification is the overarching theme for when you don’t know how to explain something in religion. How did Jesus manage to be fully human and fully God? Mystification. How much of our daily lives should be spent concentrating on God? Mystification. This is not a bad thing, for there are things we don’t know how to answer; but it does seem to be the ready-made answer for too many questions. I submit mystification is the religious form of repression. Just like with repression, mystification forces us to become trained in denial and deception. A repressed thought is one that never gets ...

The paradox is: We search outside ourselves for fulfillment. We need things to fulfill us. On the other hand, the greatest fulfillment is choosing God; we find God within ourselves. Fulfillment in life will never be contented if it is constantly replacing itself with more stuff. Fulfillment is reached when we take an inward approach to life, faith and spirituality. There is wholeness in the world and there is an avenue where we find God – it is in the contemplative, pensive moments of life. As humans we must take the time to reflect, sit, think, ponder, wonder, imagine, create, envision, fashion, visualize, craft, construct, doubt, speculate and marvel. Doing this exercise propels us deep within ourselves and connects us with the Divine. In my short time in this world, I have found God most clearly when I am deeply listening to my soul speak. I hear God more plainly when I search my heart’s mind and think about what it needs. This past week I spent five days in a sp...

This semester I learned a new word that has enlightened the way I see human nature. Exocentricity - Finding meaning to life outside of ourselves. All humans have this. We look for friends to complete us. We search for jobs to sustain us. We marry to fulfill us. We travel to protract us. We purchase to maintain us. And the list goes on and on. We as humans are not complete as we are. We need something outside of ourselves to make us feel fully alive. This is why we create habits, have friends and even find favorite restaurants. We take an object or thought and compare it to some other object or thought. We look beyond the present to fulfill the definition of the current moment. What we have is never sufficient and we think we need to obtain that which will make our joy complete. This is why marketing is so popular. When Coca-Cola released their slogan “The Real Thing” their profit margin nearly doubled. The reason for this is because their advertising spoke to ou...