True Nature

I’ve never been one to steep myself in ideology, or to even be a devoted follower of anything. It seems that as soon as I attach myself to anything outside of myself or my experience, that thing eventually becomes stale, foreign and untrue.

I often think back to the beginning of my yoga journey, wondering what specifically brought me to it. I know the inward drive had to do with seeing past the reality of what was before me, in search of something deeper. I indeed found that something deeper and taught about it for a decade and a half. But life happened and I stepped away.

The deeper truths that continue to reveal themselves on the other side of teaching yoga have been inspiring. Those tools gave me a new way to see. They led me to Contemplative Christianity and eventually to what I now consider an interspiritual worldview, where everything belongs.

I have so much in my head these days; it’s hard to write because I don’t understand how it all fits together. (That’s WHY I should write, right?) I’m also scared and angry at what our world is becoming. So today, I choose peace, and part of that peace is sitting with and letting what I actually believe sink deep into my bones, fill me, penetrate me, become me. I’ll start here … Richard Rohr believes (as do I) that nature has been revealing God long before the Bible and Church came to be:  

Nature itself is the primary Bible. The world is the locus of the sacred and provides all the metaphors that the soul needs for its growth.  

If you scale chronological history down to the span of one year, with the Big Bang on January 1, then our species, Homo sapiens, doesn’t appear until 11:59 p.m. on December 31. That means our written Bible and the Church appeared in the last nanosecond of December 31. I can’t believe that God had nothing to say until the last moment. Rather, as both Paul and Thomas Aquinas say, God has been revealing God’s love, goodness, and beauty since the very beginning through the natural world of creation (see Romans 1:20). “God looked at everything God had made and found it very good” (Genesis 1:31).  

Acknowledging the intrinsic value and beauty of creation, elements, plants, and animals is a major paradigm shift for most Western and cultural Christians. We limited God’s love and salvation to our own human species, and even then, we did not have enough love to go around for all of humanity! God ended up looking quite miserly and inept, to be honest.  

From the Center for Action and Contemplation’s Daily Meditations

Here is the deep truth I feel in my heart today: We’ve made God far too small, trying to fit all people into OUR beliefs instead allowing them to have the truth of their experience.

This is a beginning. I hope I have a lot more to say as the days unfold, but for now, this is it. This is my true nature. I’ll be damned if I let the world tell me to be otherwise.

(Photo by Andrey Andreyev on Unsplash)