Volume 17, No. 1-Winter, 1993

Group Spiritual Direction
by Susan Burke

Gesture of Love
by Rose Mary Dougherty

A Kind of Ministry
by Carolyn Stevens

The Stag's Lesson
by Gerald May

What Draws Us to Shalem
by Jack Hutchings

Toward a Contemplative Theology
by Carolyn Tanner Irish

The Price of Kissing
by Tilden Edwards

Group Spiritual Direction

by Susan Burke

The experience of group spiritual guidance can be all-encompassing as a way to God. It stretches, redefines, breaks open, embraces, supports, challenges anyone who is committed to sweeping away the parts of their lives that interfere with allowing God in. Shy or talkative, novice or veteran on the spiritual journey, we are called to come out of hiding from behind the human defenses that block us from God and each other. When we do, we find ourselves in a garden of every growing thing, not the dark wasteland we might have feared.

This is my third year in Shalem's group spiritual direction group. We meet monthly, two dozen women and men, for two and a half hours in the evening. The large group gathers and sits in silence for a half hour in the darkened prayer room, lit by candles with their sensual aroma of wax and fire. At first, the silence seemed no discipline at all to me, because it seemed to require nothing--no bright conversation, no announcements of spiritual insight, no revelations of vulnerability, no attending to another's expressions of thoughts, feelings, actions.

Yet as time went on, I came to realize that this large group gathering is a crucial grounding for the following two hours in small groups and so requires something fundamental--loosening our hold on the ego so God will have the space to enter. As that happens for each of us, our time together creates the intimacy that is unique to being together in God without words. It gives the freedom to be authentic that is born in silence. Nothing is shared aloud, except at the first session of the year, when we tell who we are and why we are here. After that, those not in my small group become for me concrete metaphors for the Body of Christ. Without speaking we know we are united in a desire to be with God more and more deeply through each other. Together we sit and breathe, the most ancient form of prayer.

After we disperse into small groups of three or four, each with a facilitator, we begin again in silence but then are called to emerge from the cocoon of quiet to reveal how we sense God is working in our lives. One by one, we take a turn, talking for about 15 minutes, then waiting in prayerful silence for the others to respond. This process takes discipline if, as I am, you're accustomed to spontaneous group dialogue--to jumping in at will to respond, to suggest, to instruct, to set the record straight. But I have come to see why we are quiet until the speaker has finished. It is her picture, not ours. We need to look at all the sides and the corners and the center, as she paints it, before we can see her truth. Even more importantly, our waiting gives God a chance to get a word in edgewise before we declare the subject "solved."

And it is very tempting to try to "fix" things so we can have that comfortable feeling of "doing some good." This is a safe approach, but it's not spiritual guidance. Fortunately our facilitator (or someone else in the group) will gently steer us back on track, and over time we become more sensitive to the temptation when it creeps back, as it is bound to do. We learn, little by little, the difference between ourselves and God. We are in the presence of God, we are there for God for each other, we are instruments of God, but we are not God.

In fact, we are not even the spiritual directors. The Spirit of God is the actual guide. I imagine our small group as a wheel. The four of us sit in a small room, a lit candle in the center symbolizing the presence of God in our midst and the reality of God as our center. The spokes of the wheel radiate from each of us to that center, and we are joined in a circle of prayerful intention. As it turns, we learn where we are going.

An honest love forms among us and we slowly, surely, let each other into our God life. As our trust of each other fans out to take over the group, the Spirit of God sweeps in like rain.

Susan, a newspaper editor, is also an associate in Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program.

Gesture of Love

by Rose Mary Dougherty

"If You Have Nothing"
by Jessica Powers

The gesture of a gift is adequate.
If you have nothing: laurel leaf or bay,
no flower, no seed, no apple gathered late,
do not in desperation lay
the beauty of your tears upon the clay.
No gift is proper to a Deity;
no fruit is worthy for such power to bless.
If you have nothing, gather back your sigh,
and with your hands held high, your heart held high,
lift up your emptiness!

From Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers,
edited by Regina Siegfried and Robert Morneau.
Copyright (c) 1989 Carmelite Monastery of Pewaukee, WI.
Published by Sheed & Ward, PO Box 419492,
Kansas City, MO 64141.

We had been talking together for nearly an hour, this woman and I. Several times she had asked the same question: "Rose Mary, what do you think? Is this dry restlessness coming from God?" Each time I answered her question with other questions: "What do you think?" "Why is it so important for you to know this?" "Are you able to be with God in this?" "What have you said to God about it?" Consistently her responses revealed her primary concern — her love of God and her desire to do the loving thing. She was afraid that her restlessness had something to do with her lack of love. If God wanted the restlessness, she wanted it, also. She felt, however, that it was interfering with her prayer and her attentiveness to others. She just wasn't feeling very loving at all. When after nearly an hour I offered no direct answer to her question, she blurted out her frustration: "You used to tell me, Rose Mary! You used to be able to tell me whether something was of God!"

Her words struck a sensitive nerve in me. I heard them as an accusation that I was withholding some hidden knowledge, without which my usefulness as a spiritual director was questionable. Yet I couldn't dispute the words themselves. Frequently during our ten years of meeting she had sought a sense of rightness in her choices or some hint of God's hand in whatever was going on in her. She especially sought the latter when she considered what was going on to be of negative consequences. And I had often responded to such a need for knowing. This time, however, I had no answer, only grasping prayer: "God, give me something for this person, some clarity or at least something that sounds like wisdom." But God left me to my own resources. After a long silence I managed to be truthful: "I just don't know anymore. The more I listen to myself and others, the less certain I am of what God wants in a given situation. Sometimes I don't have a clue about what's really going on in me or where it is coming from. All I know is that I have come to trust God more in my unknowing than I did in my knowing. I am not really comfortable in this place, but it is the only place I can be. I would prefer to have some answers for you and for me."

Afterward I looked at my discomfort. I realized that it was really only a habitual reaction to my inability to meet the needs of others, but it was no longer authentic. Even my prayer for wise-sounding words seemed more a command performance for my ego than deeply felt. In the deepest part of me there was a peace. Yet I felt the pain of that very good person who wanted certainty. From the many years of praying with her and listening to her, I trusted that her wanting came from a place of love, that she wanted only to be a responsible lover. Her love had no margin of error. It had no rest until it knew right doing. Rightness was more than a gesture of love for her; it was the measure of love.

There was a time when knowing what God wanted, responding rightly to love was important to me, also. It was as though I could confirm my loving by my knowing. If I had the "right " loving response, then I would be loving. The converse seemed equally true: "If I am truly loving, then I will have the right loving response — to prayer, to life, to friends, to God." When others asked what God might want in a given situation, I was more than eager to help them find an answer. I tried to ask the right questions, to examine thoroughly every possibility of what God might want. Often, though, we lost sight of love. Hence there was little room for trust in our driven search. Trust finds nurture in the ground of vulnerability, and vulnerability is born of unknowing. The passion for knowing had eroded trust and eclipsed the love. Something in me had been shifting, however. Trust was deepening, and love was slowly beginning to show itself again. The conversation with this woman had helped me recognize the change, but I had yet to claim it.

Three months later, just two weeks after Shalem's Winter Retreat, I found myself in a similar conversation, this time with myself. The retreat for me was mostly a time of being held in love, just as I was. Despite (or because of) that, the week was a mixture of peace and uneasiness for me. Sometimes I rested in the love; at other times I tried to run. But love held its ground. Its communication was simple, direct, and constant: "You are mine and I love you — now and always. Live in my love — now and always."

Despite my protestations, I trusted that love more than I trusted anything else and wanted to live in that love. Two weeks later, when afterglow was fading and my heart grew restless in its emptiness, the questioning began: "What was the meaning of the experience? How should I respond? How can I be restless in the face of such great love? Am I running from the love? What does God want of me now? What is the right thing to do?" The questions kept coming until somewhere in the midst of them I remembered what I had learned three months ago.

In the remembering I became one with the woman who had taught me. I felt God's sadness for her and for me. God knew so well the tender core of our hearts, knew the loving, and must have ached with the pain of pouring love into hearts so entombed in their need to prove love that they couldn't receive love. God must have ached to see us caught in false images of what it means to be loving people, always looking for the proper gift of love, seldom risking love because we might love wrongly. God's only recourse was to divest our minds of images, to complicate the knowing and subvert right loving responses, to ravage our hearts with love. There is nothing left then but to trust and, as Julian of Norwich has said, "to act as though one believes in the goodness of God."

To act as though one believes in the goodness of God is to relinquish one's need for the security of rightness. It is to trust the power of God's transforming love for ourselves and others, even through our mistaken attempts at love. It is to seek the good from the deepest place of love and to trust God in the seeking, in its outcome. It is to stand in the emptiness of unknowing, having no measure of love, no adequate gift of our love. Only love's gesture remains.

Rose Mary worked on Shalem's staff for over 20 years and is now Shalem's Senior Fellow for Spiritual Guidance.

A Kind of Ministry

by Carolyn Stevens

The following is a letter written to Tilden Edwards and Patricia Clark from Carolyn Stevens, a member of Shalem's Advisory Council who has been active in Shalem events and fundraising efforts for several years.

I've been thinking of you both and of Shalem this evening--as always with great affection and gratitude.

I'm at a fundraising training program in Memphis--a week-long small group seminar with one of the top experts. Among our group of nine students are the president and vice president for development of a small liberal arts college in Texas that is associated with the Presbyterian church.

We had dinner together this evening, and the three of us were joined by a young woman who is somewhat new to fundraising. On the walk back to our hotel, she mentioned her difficulty in explaining to her peers how it was that she was unafraid/unashamed to ask for money.

Sam, the college president, told her about a theologian who was his mentor and who inspired him years ago with his own answer to that query: First, I am not asking for myself; second, I believe in my institution and its mission; third, God tells us that givers live better lives than takers, so in asking I'm merely helping someone be more fufilled.

It was a complete reply--but of course I do find it hard not to add my two cents, so I shared my experience that in working with a spiritual development organization I discovered the deepest personal meaning of my work, that it is a kind of a ministry. Further (and you've heard this from me often) the word that embraces the work of asking, and giving, and stewardship of gifts--philanthropy--in its roots echoes the potential ministry of a development officer. Philanthropy means "love of mankind," the greatest example of which, of course, is God's boundless love for us. So that when we help enable joyful giving to take place, we mirror and reflect God's love for God's children. I added that I have a little mantra that I use to bolster my courage before asking; in an abbreviated way it embodies the full train of thought concerning philanthropy--ministry--and reflecting God's love and will. I tell myself, "Carolyn, be a god!" Of course they laughed.

Karen, the college vice president, then asked what the name of the spiritual development organization was, and as I said, "Shalem," so did she, in unison. She knew of Shalem from her home, a little town of 20,000, sixty miles outside San Antonio.

It was a lovely moment. In the elevator she shared her answer to the question of how we can ask others for money: "Because the world isn't finished yet." I almost floated to my room--buoyed as always by voicing again the nature of fundraising as a calling and ministry, an understanding that has animated my professional life and converted it to my real life in the Spirit--an understanding that is a constant gift to me, and I pray, also a gift through me to the world. It is a gift that Shalem gave to me. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I thank God for Shalem, for you and the guidance you (and of course many others) have given to that remarkable community.

I hope you will feel affirmed and encouraged that the Light you help so many of us begin to glimpse shines through us to many lives. Your constant care has nurtured the refraction of that Light so that it now intersects in far away and unlikely places--such as a small seminar of fundraisers in Memphis, where a person with experience of Shalem finds a person from thousands of miles away who has a warm, interested awareness of Shalem. That's pretty special for a ragtag band of candle-gazers!

The Stag's Lesson

by Gerald May

"Be like a stag upon the mountain." - The Song of Songs

On two successive November mornings, I saw a stag in Rock Creek Park in the heart of Washington. A city creature, he is less afraid of people than the deer I see in the country. He permitted me to watch him for a long time. I think he is street-wise but wild.

What I saw was a lesson in civil wildness. He nipped at branches and nibbled at grass, but frequently he stopped and stood very still for a long time. In these extended stillnesses he was smelling the air, listening to the sounds, looking, seeing all around. I sensed his feeling the ground beneath his hooves, feeling the sensations inside his strong, good body. He shook his antlers with immense dignity and seeming pleasure. My vision of him was of his savoring his essential male-deer-ness. It was his expression of "I am who I am."

For days and weeks afterwards, his image remained in my mind. I could see him, standing very still or moving with deep certainty, emanating life, presence, confidence, courage, simplicity and a strange wise-wild strength. He was impeccable, and I was pleasantly haunted by the feeling that he was teaching me something.

One of these days, God willing, I shall relinquish the striving to put every darned thing into words. But for now I am compelled to try to articulate the stag's lesson. I am at a remedial level in stag-wisdom, but what he taught me has to do with prayer and being--with praying and prayerfulness.

We humans pray to God with a sense of ourselves and a sense of Godward attention, and sometimes a sense of God. We tell God how we're feeling or what our hopes are. We ask God for clarity or guidance, healing or forgiveness. We pray on behalf of others, in thanksgiving, and in praise. Sometimes we become silent before God or with God, in receptivity or communion. All of this is good, honest, human prayer. The deer, I think, does not know this kind of prayer.

Then there is another kind of prayer, a more subtle and flowing being-in-God that weaves its way through the moments of our lives when other things are going on. It is what I have called prayerfulness, being-prayer, practicing the presence. Some call it a contemplative attitude or the habit of discernment. Before the stag's lesson, I saw this prayerfulness as a receptive interior attitude, an atmosphere of willingness for God and God's way within the present moment. The stag taught me that this is not the whole truth. In full being-prayer, there is more than willingness and receptivity.

The stag communicated a very dynamic and lively being who-one-is-where-one-is. This is possible for humans as well, if we can find our natural wildness that actively feels itself and sniffs the air, sees everything clearly, and listens with very alert ears. Do not think that deer--or humans who have learned the lesson--become so vigilant only to detect danger. The alertness is also to detect goodness: food, companionship, soft places, water, sunlight, shade and sky. And more than that, it is to be appreciatively alive and responsive to where you are and what you will do next. The alertness goes inside as well as outside; it senses the quality of your heartbeat, the depth of your breath, the warmth of your hide, the comfort or tightness of your guts. It is feeling all your being in the completeness of your situation.

To do this well, the deer teaches, you must take many times to stand very still in the midst of whatever you are doing. Whether grazing or walking, running through the forest or drinking from a stream, you must stop and become very attentive. Lift your head; look and see what is around you. Perk your ears; listen and hear. Sniff the air. Feel your body. Move only that which helps you sense: shake your horns a little, paw the ground a bit, take one breath that is deeper than most. Turn your head to look here or there, lick your tongue to taste your face. The stillness inside must become exquisite; it must deepen into a moment of absolutely pure, utterly simple wakefulness in which your whole being is vitally present. In this stillness, you exist in beauty, and your next movement is perfectly clear. It is the practical, immediate ground of both appreciation and wisdom.

Now, when I walk in the woods and fields, I like to stop, sometimes suddenly, sometimes softly. I stand like a tree. I look around and feel my body. I notice my breath steaming in the cool air. I sense, inside, my emotions and heart-perceptions. My listening is sharp and my seeing acute. I feel the temperature, the sun or the snowflakes, and what thoughts or images may come to the surface of my mind. If I want to know which way to turn next, I wait, see, listen. My being lives and wisdom comes. And then I give myself to walking again.

Although not quite the same, these wakeful pauses can happen at my desk, in meetings, at the dinner table, anywhere. They can happen in prayer times as well. Now, when I have a decision to make or a problem to live with, I pray for guidance, for mercy, for help. And, in the midst of that prayer, and later in the middle of work or play, I stop. Stock still. Very alert. Gentle. The guidance does come, though God usually does not give it in a fully articulated way, such as, "What I want you to do is...." It arises as the simple next step, from the immediacy of being fully alive right then.

The stag did not teach me something to do. He simply, directly expressed himself to me in a glimpse of fully alive deer-ness, pointing me towards my own realization of fully alive prayerfulness. There is something profoundly trustworthy here, something strong, a being-ness completely undomesticated, radical, and wise. It knows we live and move and have our very being in God.

What Draws Us to Shalem

by Jack Hutchings

During a break at Shalem's recent Psychology and Spirituality Workshop, I was touched as I talked with several people who had driven all the way from Long Island in order to attend. One member of the group, who has a ministry to persons with AIDS, originally learned of Jerry May's books through a meditation group. They all wanted to hear more to help them in their ministry. They also wished to purchase copies of Jerry's Simply Sane, since members had passed around and used their sole copy until it had become threadbare.

What besides books leads us to Shalem?

In my case, when I attended a Washington Cathedral presentation of an ecumenical day providing spiritual resources, I had never heard of Shalem nor did I know the names of any of the staff. Out of a wide variety of speakers and presentations I was firmly drawn not only to hear Jerry May talk about Experiences of God but also to Tilden Edwards' Moving from Mind to Heart in Prayer. Ostensibly I selected these two sessions out of the many possibilities, although I now wonder whether it was my selecting or my being led. The words were important and liberating; I experienced permission to stop struggling and just to be open. "Be still and wait for God." But more important than the words was the feeling of "Oh! Ah! YES! This is it!"

Can the Oh! Ah! YES! be transmitted?

The Shalem Development and Communications Committee is charged to consider "ways to increase awareness and understanding of Shalem among the larger spiritual community and general public." There is an ongoing tension in spreading the good news about Shalem, and Committee members have prayed and sought inspiration on just how best to do this. Some of our suggestions have been accepted; others deemed too intrusive, over-assertive, or "not the Shalem way." There have been some changes in announcements, press releases, and advertisements; and there are now some Shalem family members willing to speak about Shalem to congregational groups; but a nagging doubt remains--are these adequate or even useful?

Despite these uncertainties, one thing seems clear both from earlier and more recent inquiries--people hear about Shalem in a variety of ways, but they may need a nudge of some experience of the contemplative approach before they actually enroll in a Shalem program. Of those who attend retreats or apply for the longer programs, most do so upon the recommendation of a spiritual director or spiritual friend. Those of us who live near Washington also find that encouraging friends interested in prayer or meditation to attend an open house helps them decide whether or not to try one of the workshops or quiet days.

What draws us to Shalem? We might as well ask how and why Grace ever enters our lives.

Jack, who chairs the Communications Sub-Committee, is a graduate of Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program and a long-time participant in Shalem events.

Toward a Contemplative Theology

by Carolyn Tanner Irish

On two occasions in the last year I was asked to present a course or paper on "contemplative theology." It did not occur to me to wonder how the institutions involved came up with this topic, which I had never heard of before. Jerry May and I had been co-leading a group at Shalem called "Contemplative Theological Reflection" however, and that seemed close enough, so I accepted the invitations and went to work with great enthusiasm.

Still, it is only now that I begin to sense a subtle loss that happens when we casually turn practices into products, verbs into nouns. Contemplative theology sounds like a branch or subset of regular theology (whatever that is), or perhaps like the end-product of contemplation. Contemplative theological reflection is a prayerful practice in which head and heart, thinking and loving, participate together. It is a simple practice, almost naive, based on fewer assumptions about God and ourselves, lesser goals than clear and coherent systems, and probably nothing that would really count as a "methodology." It would see little hope in trying to sustain a subject/object division. It would value authenticity over orthodoxy. And its language would be particular and experiential, rather than general and abstract.

Contemplative theological reflection has in fact been part of Shalem's life for a long time--integral to our groups, meetings, formation programs, and retreats. Perhaps we didn't know we were learning to do it (as some children never know they are learning to read). Thus our new group--"Contemplative Theological Reflection"--has seeds, roots, and husbandry well prepared in the soil of contemplative prayer itself, but also little desire for a life of its own apart from this humble-human-humous home.

The Contemplative Theological Reflection Group has been meeting weekly for about a year and a half now, to "walk around" some of the issues, ideas, and images that arise in our life with God, and more recently to stay with certain recurring themes in the spiritual journey--our sense of immediate nearness and distance, unity and separation, fear and trust, willingness and grace. As openly as we can, we listen for God in the words and thoughts of others before us, and in the shared silence and responsiveness of our time together. Claiming our desire for God and opening ourselves freely, trustingly, to others' experience of God, we occasionally sense ourselves near something that is perhaps the "Mind of Christ." It undergirds our being and at the same time draws us toward a greater wholeness. Always our hope is that our communication will draw from that common source and lead to that common end that is communion in community and community in communion.

This experience has rather spoiled me for traditional theological dialogue. From it I see how easily words (theologies) fence off turf rather than open us to God; how easily they secure us where we are rather than encourage us on our way; how they tell us what is worth seeing and so shape what we are able to see; and perhaps most of all, how words may reinforce divisions within and among ourselves, rather than gathering and integrating our personal and common life.

The gospel is eternal but enfleshed. We are enfleshed but our viewpoint is not eternal; it is mediated through "earthen vessels." The eternal, the universal, comes to us through the immediate, the particular, through experience. To do theology we must listen deeply to our own--and others--experience.

Communications--words, categories, and theories--are often servants of worldly powers--egos, institutions, and ideologies. And in the process of communicating we may reach or bow, open or shut down, violate or be violated to and by these powers. But there are other possibilities for our thoughts and words; rising freshly--not calculated and calibrated to other ends, they may simply witness to a deep beauty, a clear light, a generous goodness in the One who also desires to be known.

We are in continuity with generations of people nurtured on the fruits of the Enlightenment--with all its reasoned categories, its analysis and systems, its norms of empiricism and logic, to say nothing of its separation of personal and common life. This is not all bad by any means. But in contemplative theological reflection I have a sense of something deeply healing. As a human being I am again a seamless unity of mind-heart-soul-body. In human community, I find my life intertwined with others, with all the community of creation, and with our Creator. Thoughts and words then serve the communities grounded in communion, rather than other powers (in ourselves or in the world) that would displace God.

But my experience of contemplative theological reflection shows me also that words and thoughts are not only or always servants, a means to some other end; words may also incarnate love, give it shape and place, life and form in the world. A fragment from a graduation speech by Wendell Berry stays with me and is tested in my daily experience of God:

The older love becomes, the more clearly it understands its involvement in partiality, imperfection, suffering, and mortality. Even so, it longs for incarnation. It can no longer live by thinking.

And yet to put on flesh and do the flesh's work, it must think.

These words describe perfectly my sense of love "becoming older" yet longing for expression, embodiment, voice, part. When we truly find our voice, and perhaps our words, and when we truly hear the voice and expression given to others, we participate in something far more wondrous than communication. In the words of the late Alan Ecclestone, we "discover...our part in the song of the earth, the music of the spheres, the Lord's song, and the hymn of creation...and give it utterance."

The Price of Kissing

by Tilden Edwards

"I would love to kiss you. The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let's buy it."

The 13th century mystic Rumi shows us in words here what Jesus showed us with his life: If you want to be "in" Love, the price is all you would cling to other than that Love for your life. When we truly find the precious pearl of divine Love (or rather, when we let it find us), and are in our right mind, we're willing to give everything for it, because it's what we're made for, and nothing else fulfills.

That Love permeates our human loves, so I find it worth pondering Rumi's metaphor of a kiss. Think what it's like to yearn for a kiss with someone you deeply love. The yearning ultimately comes, I believe, from our desire for deep communion with a fellow loving creature, and through that creature, consciously or unconsciously, with the Creator of Love. When we yearn to kiss we want to move beyond our sense of separateness into our sense of unity with life. We are not able to sustain such unity with everyone unless we are a saint, but with some people, at special times, we are drawn to that unity. We want to express the inner union we feel with them in an outward physical act. In the act of vulnerable kissing (or embracing, too), there is a moment of letting go of our defensive boundaries and flowing into a common ground with the other person.

Along with our yearning for this union, however, we sometimes find ourselves resisting its intimacy. This resistance, I believe, stems from our ego's fear of losing an independent sense of control and becoming vulnerable to who-knows-what kind of exploitation, rejection, smothering, or unpredictable change. Vulnerable kissing requires a quality of trust that is hard to come by (as opposed to the invulnerable peck on the cheek or the power-tripping or purely lust-driven kiss of a seducer). Even when that trust is there, we may not have the "heart opening" at a given time to be drawn to a sustained, intimate physical expression.

Our relation to the Love that birthed us is amazingly similar. "I would love to kiss you" leaps out of us in vulnerable, open moments of prayer. We yearn to realize the communion that we already have in God's eyes, but in the mystery of our freedom and the nature of love, it is a communion that we are invited to embrace. We find that we cannot sustain that embrace. Such sustained communion belongs to the realm of fuller sanctity than most of us know. Most of us who are on an intentional spiritual journey are in and out of embracing God intimately all day long. But something in us longs for a more sustained embracing. Sometimes we experience God's Spirit shining through an embrace with a fellow creature. That is a very whole moment because in that time Creator and creature are more one than two: creation is seen as permeable and reconciled to its mysterious, intimate Creator. In such a moment we realize something of the divine-human intimacy that we are shown in Christ.

But the price of full embrace is nothing short of our life--our life apart-from-God. Such a life-apart involves our clinging to a view of thoughts, images, things, and acts as our own privately held possessions that we let define us as completely apart from God. This contrasts with seeing these personal markings as pervaded with divine invitation and inspiration that point to our intimate soul-connectedness with the One who continues creation in, with and through us. As in our resistance to vulnerable human kissing, our identification with these personal markings as private possessions rather than as outcroppings of our souls-in-God leaves us fearing loss. What ego-security is left us if we no longer identify with what we think we "have"? Who are we if we cannot define ourselves in such a completely separate way? As we and God embrace and kiss, though, we slowly or rapidly lose our orientation to our old sense of a very separate, protective self. Each phase of this stripping involves still more trust, until in the end there is nothing left to cling to inside except a naked trust, as we become void of everything we have held back to secure us.

In deep, human love this evolving process can be seen, too. We can be willing to die for the loved one in many ways and find a deeper quality of freedom-from-possessive-self. Our sense of divine involvement weaves in and out of consciousness in this human relationship. But at some point this human encounter no longer suffices to describe our deepening realization of the image of God in us. The great saints speak of all becoming grace. The divine kiss is recognized and wanted in everything. The love inside joins the love outside until there is little sense of in or out at all. Life grows from the divine embrace everywhere, however painfully. For most of us this sense of embrace is largely desire and occasional realization. Our daily prayer, though, can be for greater openness to the embracing grace at hand, so that we are more and more free not to worry about loss and instead let our loving shout to our life, What a bargain, let's buy it!

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