The Spring Within You
I’d like to meditatively reflect on something I read from the Center for Action’s Daily Meditations earlier this morning:
“Jesus’ most wonderful metaphor for [the] inner experience of grace is “a spring within you.” This spring is not outside us, it’s within us, and it’s bubbling up unto eternal life. Spiritual knowing and spiritual cognition are always really re-cognition. It’s the realization that what we already know is true at some deep level. We’ve had an intuition or a suspicion that we might just be a beloved child of God, but we often think that it’s too good to imagine. Heaven is already given, and the gift is already handed over. To the woman at the well, Jesus says very directly, “If you but knew the gift of God … you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10). Jesus is telling her and us that we already have the gift of God! The Spirit has been poured into our hearts at the moment of our creation. We are already children of God. The water is bubbling up within us but we often don’t dare believe it.”
Center for Action and Contemplation Daily Meditation (CAC DM), 6 November 2023
Why do we, as creaturely humans, have such a hard time believing this? Why do we, more often than not, feel unworthy of any good, freely-given thing? It’s certainly not the way of the world we’re living in … ‘Nothing is free in this life. You get what you pay for.’ We live in developed countries with systems in place that assign value to things unrelated to the Divine. Money is the driving factor in a capitalistic world, and beyond having the ability to pay for what we need, some of us have enough to also pay for the things we want, to be extravagant. Money is power. Money is energy. And it’s not bad per se, but it takes us far from the truth when we give it too much power over our lives. It makes the above quoted statement seem unreal, an impossibility. ‘Nothing is free in this world; everything comes with a price.’ But that’s the truth of this world, this matrix we live in, this made up system we’ve all somehow agreed to. It’s not divine reality. It’s not Truth.
So those of us who are spiritual (or religious) are living within a context. Living in this world as a spiritual person often still means striving … to get to heaven through good works, going to church, studying the Bible, right action, right belief, right (insert any number of words). And certainly all of those things are good and worthy; we should consistently try to do better, treat others as we wish to be treated, but what about recognizing our inherent goodness as a starting point? I assert that doing so makes it a lot easier to see the good in others.
None of us are worthy of the gifts that await us. We are all deeply flawed. All of us. Perfection doesn’t exist on earth as it does in heaven. It’s not even something we should be striving for. Instead our work is to recognize our identity in Christ, to surrender to it, and to allow grace to flow through us in the way that God intends. Perhaps this is the meaning of ‘being in this world but not of it.’
Our entire life is a gift, but we don’t see it that way. Instead we are stuck in our heads … problems, woes, striving, work, personal dramas … “when we surrender to the reality/identity/knowing [of our true identities, not the ones we make up in our heads], the fountain of grace begins to flow. We stop seeking our own worthiness and we begin to know the gift of God. We begin to realize that it’s all gift, and it’s all free, and we already have it, and all we can do is learn to enjoy it. That changes everything.” CAC DM
For me, the big questions … How do we do it? How do we flip the switch? How do we live into our True Selves instead of our small ego selves?
As I sit with those questions, the answers that bubble up are contemplative practice and kenosis (self emptying). Quieting the mind enough to see past duality into the true nature of things. Recognizing that breath alone connects us to God and our deeper selves. Reading the word. Getting out of our heads and into our bodies. Pondering the Truth in our hearts. Feeling the truth in our bodies.
Truth with a capital T cannot be found through logic and reason. It’s only available from within … like a spring that flows forth. Because it does. This is gift, grace, love. Our birthright. Praise God.
Photo by Alex Muromtsev on Unsplash
