Inner Sanctuary Podcast

It’s a new year, so why not start it with a wide-open heart? That

all-embracing love can be our human expression of agape, a spiritual term

which expresses the unconditional outflowing of the holy spirit.

This year of pandemic has sent us searching, perhaps more deeply than

before, for the inner light and love that will see us through. Inviting the

light into our state of admitted brokenness is inner radical hospitality.

Leonard Cohen poignantly describes what it is like to reach out for grace

in dark times:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in

As we walk the Advent journey, the nights are getting longer, and this year

many of us are experiencing more stillness and solitude than ever before.

It is dark and it is deep. In her book Learning to Walk in the Dark,

theologian Barbara Brown Taylor says, “New life starts in the dark. Whether

it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it

starts in the dark.”

“There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the

genuine in yourself and sometimes there is so much traffic going on in your

minds, so many different kinds of signals, so many vast impulses floating

through your organism that go back thousands of generations, long before

you were even a thought in the mind of creation, and you are buffeted by

these, and in the midst of all of this you have got to find out what your

name is. Who are you? How does the sound of the genuine come through to

you?”

In his book Invitation to Love, Thomas Keating describes what he calls the false self with its “emotional programs for happiness.” To be a follower of Christ, he says, means changing the direction in which we are looking for happiness. Instead of following our hidden (and not so hidden) motivations for security, affection, and power/control, we go inwards and consent to “divine therapy.”

Many people are describing the times we are in with the word Kairos,

meaning a time of crisis, chaos and unravelling, but also unstoppable

transformation, conversion and grace. In her essay “We Were Made for These

Times,” Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls for “souls on deck” as we weather the

storm.

In his poem “Last Night as I Was Sleeping,” Spanish poet Antonio Machado

concludes:

Last night as I slept,

I dreamt—marvelous error!—

that it was God I had

here inside my heart.

Mystical theologian Howard Thurman (1899-1981) wrote: “There is in every

person an inward sea, and in that sea there is an island, and on that

island there is an altar, and standing guard before the altar is the angel

with a flaming sword.”

Our world needs peace, and that means our world needs people who practice

peace, deeply.

Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) says “The Kingdom of God is here and now. I don’t

need to die to be in the Kingdom of God. In fact, I need to be very much

alive.” The key, he says, is presence, and to be aware that, “I think,

therefore I am not present.”