Every single morning, about sixty of us gather in silence at 7.20am. We spend twenty minutes sititing in stillness. Then a poem is read, or a verse, a passage from a novel, a song lyric, a fragment of something really powerful, written by a thought leader. And then, one by one, we share how it landed. We say a short prayer and close up the Zoom room.

What I most often leave with is a word. A phrase. A single sentence that has somehow found its way under my skin. The best way I know to describe it is a word/phrase that I want to lick over and over again like licking a lollipop, rolling the flavor slowly over the tongue, not rushing to the center, savoring the sweetness as it opens.

This is, in fact, what lectio divina is. Lectio is the ancient practice of sacred reading where you let the word you mule over to consume you. Here’s the thing: when we consciously direct attention away from the noise of content, away from the mind’s endless commentary about reality and toward a single unifying word or phrase, we begin to see, with a kind of gentle shock, how much of our world is constructed story. How much suffering lives in the gap between what is happening and what we are telling ourselves is happening.

The movement of attention from the headspace into the body is itself a type of homecoming to what is. We begin to notice what rest is, bodily sensations become more vivid, mental patterns become visible. And mystery, rather than threatening us, begins to feel like welcome country. It’s to me like the joy of seeing a new level in a game of Zelda. Or like traveling to a country for the very first time.

I built Hold (you can find it on holdwithin.app) , a free Contemplation app, for exactly this…to give a thought, a phrase, a prompting, somewhere to live and breathe. To hold it without needing to resolve it. You can work with it so slowly, so closely, that it begins to dissolve the very sense of self that picked it up in the first place. Using technology, you can be brought to remembrance during the day this jewel that becomes the gateway in which that self melts. Hold will be available in a few weeks as I iron a few kinks with the iOS app.

I have been sitting lately with one phrase, and I will share with you how it’s landing for me. It is: resting in the arms of the Lover.

I let it ask its questions. What is rest, really? What is rest, REALLY? Is it not the dropping of the shoulders, the releasing of everything that has been quietly clenched? Letting go of our assertion that things must go as we want it?

And what are these Arms? Are they not the very arms that instrument all of existence — the groundless ground through which everything rises and to which everything returns? What is it to rest in that which is objectless yet creates all objects, to trust in that which cannot be known?

All there is, is the Master. All there is, is the Lover. And to rest in those arms, it is the most radical act of trust we can demonstrate. Oh, what it means to trust in God. Is this not what it means to say ‘you are my shepherd, I lack nothing!’.

Oh friends, oh friends, oh friends — look at this spacious space in which everything exists. Is this not the Lover? How can I fully rest in the arms of this Divine Lover?

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