Can you allow your life to be unfinished?
For your sense of wonder, let go of the idea that there is a hierarchy of holiness; unsubscribe from a ladder-type theology that says you need to leave this and go there and do that to meet the Divine; and sink yourself into the wild of the world around you. The idols you build for yourself and spend your time worshipping are keeping you from discovering God hidden in the fabric of the universe. Even in the places you've been told God can't be. Even in places you've been told God is too serious, holy, and righteous to be.
The Psalmist wrote:
"Is there anyplace I can go to avoid your Spirit? To be out of your sight? If I climb to the sky, you're there! If I go underground, you're there! If I flew on morning's wings to the far western horizon, you'd find me in a minute — you're already there waiting! Then I said to myself, "Oh, God even sees me in the dark! At night I'm immersed in the light!" It's a fact: darkness isn't dark to you; night and day, darkness and light, they're all the same to you."
This Psalm is usually read in the light of good and bad, which is largely due to the colonising ways the imagery of darkness and light has been weaponised and used. It's a damaging ideology and practice that we must work to abolish. Because this Psalm? More than anything, it's about how God is everywhere already. You can't leave God because there is nowhere God isn't.
God is in laughter as well as in tears. God is in silence as well as in praise. God is in the messy as well as the serene. God is in the earth and the fire and the blood and the water. God is present at an atomic level in our cells and sinews and tissues, in particles and vibrations and sound waves. God is also present in the macro in the sun and the stars and the moon and the sky; in connection and singing and community and family; God is the fabric of things, and God is what happens when things come together in love and wonder and glory.
It all belongs. It is all holy.
In her book, The Color Purple, Alice Walker said:
"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back… The more I wonder, the more I love."
Saint Gregory of Nyssa said:
"Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees."
God isn't an entity that exists to be pleased. God is an energy that desires engagement, wonder, and curiosity. And scattered throughout the universe are moments of purple, of wonder, of wild and holy mystery waiting to connect God to us. Leave your idols behind, those staunch and rigid places of sterile hope, and open your heart to wonder: that's where you'll find God.
When you allow your life to be unfinished; when you give your faith permission to wander and grow; when you deny perfection and completion an authoritative role that wants to bequeath upon you value and worth, you begin to realise that it is in those unfinished places in the fabric of the world and your life that possibility and wonder dwell. And isn’t that where you want to be, instead of some static place of arrival? We’ll explore that and more this week.
Mindful Prompt: The more I wonder, the more I love. The more I love, the more I wonder. The more I stop and gaze at the purple in the fields, the more I see God as a gift to be lived rather than an idol to be pleased.
Written by Liz Milani
Instagram: @thepracticeco
From this week’s series titled "An Unfinished Life", with a subscription, in the App.
