In my best, my most alive moments, I have a profound sense of belonging. At those moments, I am aware of being truly at home in this universe. I know that I am not an orphan here. There is no longer any doubt in my mind that I belong to this Earth household, in which each member belongs to all others – bugs to beavers, black-eyed Susans to black holes, quarks to quails, lightning to fireflies, humans to hyenas and humus.
To say “yes” to this limitless mutual belonging is love. When I speak of God, I mean this kind of love, this great “yes” to belonging. I experience this love at one and the same time as God’s “yes” to all that exists and as my own little “yes” to it all. In saying this “yes,” I realize God’s very life and love within myself.
But there is more to this “yes” of love than a sense of belonging. There is always also a deep longing. Who has not experienced in love both the longing and the belonging?
Paradoxically, these two heighten each other’s intensity. The more intimately we belong, the more we long to belong ever more fully. Longing adds a dynamic aspect to our “yes” of love. The fervor of our longing becomes the expression and the very measure of our belonging.
Nothing is static here. Everything is in motion with a dynamism that is, moreover, deeply personal. Where love is genuine, belonging is always mutual.
The beloved belongs to the lover, as the lover belongs to the beloved. I belong to this universe and to the divine “Yes” that is its source, and this belonging is also mutual.
Now, if my deepest belonging is mutual, could my most fervent longing be mutual, too? It must be so. Staggering though it is, what I experience as my longing for God is God’s longing for me.
It makes sense, then, to speak of a personal relationship with God. We are aware of this – dimly at least – in the moments when we are most wakeful, most alive, most truly human. We can cultivate this relationship by cultivating wakefulness, by living our human life to the full.
The Bible expresses these insights in the words “God speaks.” God speaks, and I am able to answer.
God’s poetry comes to our senses
But how does God speak? Through everything there is. Every person, every situation, is ultimately Word. It tells me something and challenges me to respond. Each moment with all it contains spells out the great “yes” in a new and unique way. By making my response, I myself am becoming the Word that God speaks in me and to me and through me. How can I give a full response to this present moment unless I am alert to its message?
And how can I be alert unless all my senses are wide awake? God’s inexhaustible poetry comes to me in five languages: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting. All the rest is interpretation – literary criticism, as it were, not the poetry itself. Poetry resists translation. It can be fully experienced only in its original language. This is all the truer of the divine poetry of sensuousness.
When and to what do your senses respond most readily? I think immediately of working in the garden at the hermitage where I am privileged to live for the better part of each year.
For fragrance, I grow jasmine, pineapple mint, sage, thyme, and eight different kinds of lavender. What abundance of delightful smells! And what variety of sounds: spring rain, autumn wind, birds – mourning dove, blue jay, the hawk’s sharp cry at noon and the owl’s hooting at nightfall – the sound the yard broom makes on gravel, wind chimes and the creaking garden gate.
Who could translate the taste of strawberry or fig into words? What an infinite array of things to touch, from the wet grass under my bare feet in the morning, to the sun-warmed boulders against which I lean when the evening turns cool.
My eyes go back and forth between the near and the far: the golden metallic beetle lost among rose petals; the immense expanse of the Pacific, rising from below the cliff on which this hermitage is perched to the far-off horizon where sea and sky meet in mist.
To have a place of solitude like this makes it easy to let the heart expand, to come alive with fresh vitality. Whatever our circumstances, we need to somehow set aside a time and a place for this kind of experience. It is a necessity, not a luxury.
What comes alive in those moments is more than eyes or ears; our heart listens and rises to respond. Until I attune my senses, my heart remains dull, sleepy, half dead. In the measure to which my heart wakes up, I hear the challenge to rise to my responsibility.
Grateful living brings joy
There are many methods for cultivating mindfulness. The one I have chosen is gratefulness, which can be practiced, cultivated, learned.
Before I open my eyes in the morning, I remind myself that I have eyes to see, while millions of my brothers and sisters are blind. In the evening, I jot down one thing for which I have never before been grateful. I have done this for years, and the supply still seems inexhaustible.
Gratefulness brings joy to my life.
Most importantly, it strengthens our sense of belonging. Grateful living is a celebration of the universal give-and-take of life, a limitless “yes” to belonging. To say an unconditional “yes” to the mutual belonging of all beings will make this a more joyful world.
This is the reason why Yes is my favorite synonym for God.
Brother David Steinsdl-Rast is a Benedictine monk at Mount Saviour Monastery in New York and the author of “The Way of Silence: Embracing the Sacred in Daily Life” (Franciscan Media). This was first published on the Franciscan Spirit blog.