Scraping Barnacles

Day 5 of a week-long retreat among Benedictine brothers and sisters, with much time set aside for rest and release, intimacy and absorption (that’s what God said I was here for when I asked on day 1).

Rest was obvious – having just retired after 45 or so years in the working world I am exhausted.  Sleep, light reading, and long walks have been much-needed sources of deep rest.  Release, I imagined, would be a letting go of old habits, fears, thoughts, anxieties, and some of that is happening.  The unexpected release, though, is about new thoughts, new ideas, new energies that had been trapped before and are now ‘free to move about the cabin’, as it were, or at least to move about in my mind.

Intimacy and absorption I understood as God’s invitation to move more fully into conscious communion with the Divine, and I find that invitation quite daunting.  As much as I confess I desire such spiritual communion, the thought of it fills me with fear – who, me? why me? I can’t do that! I don’t know how! – and the silent reply is, ‘I will do that for you, my child.’

And in the walking and sitting and praying and breathing it comes to me – that conscious awareness of God, of Spirit, at the core of my being is already there, has always been there, and my only task is to scrape off the barnacles of thought and fear and false identification to enjoy that presence.  Some of those barnacles are quite old, leftovers from childhood; some are fairly recent, and so are easier to scrape off.  Some may turn out to be terribly deeply embedded; scraping them off might leave scars, or worse, they may never come off, but that’s actually ok.  They can’t truly obscure the radiant Spirit that indwells the core of each and every human being.  Work on the ones that can be released, let God do the rest.

That is enough.