Safeguarding our Souls

 

This was shared with my congregation, September 21, 2020, and worth returning to…

 

Some thoughts from Richard Rohr (from a September 21 email entitled, "Some simple but urgent guidance to get us through these next months")

 

"I awoke on Saturday, September 19, with three sources in my mind for guidance: Etty Hillesum (1914 – 1943), the young Jewish woman who suffered much more injustice in the concentration camp than we are suffering now; Psalm 62, which must have been written in a time of a major oppression of the Jewish people; and the Irish Poet, W.B.Yeats (1965 – 1939), who wrote his “Second Coming” during the horrors of the World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic. 

 

There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too … And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. 
—Etty Hillesum, Westerbork transit camp

Yeats' The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Psalm 62:5–9
In God alone is my soul at rest.
God is the source of my hope.
In God I find shelter, my rock, and my safety.
Human beings are but a puff of wind,
Mortals who think themselves important are a delusion.
Put them on a scale,
They are gone in a puff of wind."

PRACTICE

Rohr suggests, "Stand as a sentry at the door of your senses for these coming months, so 'the blood-dimmed tide' cannot make its way into your soul.

 

He continues: 

If you will allow, I recommend for your spiritual practice for the next four months that you impose a moratorium on exactly how much news you are subject to—hopefully not more than an hour a day of television, social media, internet news, magazine and newspaper commentary, and/or political discussions. It will only tear you apart and pull you into the dualistic world of opinion and counter-opinion, not Divine Truth, which is always found in a bigger place.

 

Instead, I suggest that you use this time for some form of public service, volunteerism, mystical reading from the masters, prayer—or, preferably, all of the above. You have much to gain now and nothing to lose. Nothing at all. And the world—with you as a stable center—has nothing to lose. And everything to gain."

WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO FIND REST IN THESE TUMULTUOUS TIMES?

 

I love what Etty says about the deep well inside us that dwells in God. How can we keep returning to this well? How can we let God meet us in the midst of whatever tumult surrounds us?  

Rohr gives an excellent suggestion for safeguarding our souls in this time. My own media consumption has been an all-day trickle of news that tends to stoke the fear in me, rather than feeding my soul or bringing me back to rest in God. I can choose something different.

As we consider "standing as sentry at the door of our senses these coming months," I believe this is not a call to vigilance, to muster more might and internal fortitude, and it's not a frantic reaction to the fear of losing something.  

It's an act of kindness and truth for ourselves and for the world.  We are safeguarding our own souls - the really deep well within us where we can be present with God no matter what is happening within and without.

 

We are not safeguarding God - God cannot be lost. God is above and beyond all, and also closer than our own breath. At every moment. Kind and faithful, always working for redemption and healing through every circumstance, and leading all things toward love.  It's easy to lose sight of this. God never does. And God never loses sight of us. It's easy to get swept away by fear and exhaustion and worry, and forget to return to our own souls that dwell in God. That's where we come in for one another.

We are here to help each other find rest in God, our true source of hope.  We are here to help each other keep returning to God, and to the deep wells inside us that dwell in God.  Because in God alone our souls are at rest.  God is the source of our hope.