spiritual path

The resistance is like a church bell ringing in my soul

I’m supposed to be writing my graduate school admission essay, but it’s hard. It’s hard because it matters. It’s hard because it’s personal. It’s hard because it’s about me and that brings up all of my fears, insecurities, and self doubt. 

Doing something like this brings me face to face with the stories I tell myself about my worth and my worthiness, about what it means to be accepted, and about what it means to be loved and received as I am, not as I pretend to be. 

Writing about myself, why I want this, and why I am the right candidate and this is the right school for me terrifies me because it exposes me. It exposes me because I refuse to give them only part of me. I don’t know how, and that’s not what they are asking for. It terrifies me because, if I give them all of me, what if that is not good enough? 

This fear, this paralyzing, mind-numbing, soul-shaking fear is how I know it’s important. It’s how I know it’s real. It’s how I know that I have to do it. The fear tells me where to go, even if I don’t want to go there, even if I hate the feeling of moving forward. 

The resistance is like a church bell ringing in my soul. It won’t leave me alone. It calls to me. It draws me nearer. It’s an inevitability. With every passing day and every toll of the bell, I can feel the pull toward the work that I must do. Even as I write this, seemingly in avoidance of the call, it has brought me one step closer to finishing the hard work of facing myself. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

With practice and grace

The task of a person called to live a contemplative life is to notice things, to observe God in everyday occurrences, in mundane interactions, and in the places people normally do not look for God. But if God is, isn’t God in everything? Like Adam and Eve in the garden after eating the forbidden fruit, isn’t it we who are hiding, not God? 

The call to contemplation begins as a whisper. It’s a fleeting glimpse into eternity that leaves us wanting more. In a moment, God catches us off guard and grabs our attention. He pulls back the veil and we get to see what he sees, and feel what he feels. But as quickly as he reveals himself to us, he withdraws, leaving us full and empty at the same time. 

In what feels like his absence, we long for his presence. We begin to sense, to know, that nothing less than perfect union with perfect God is going to be enough. And yet there is something in the way. We can’t quite get there no matter how much we want to. 

God is always present, constantly pouring himself out, in and through us, but we are not always present to and for him. We have to practice. Awareness takes practice. Consciousness takes practice. Stillness takes practice.

As we practice, as we awaken to God’s presence, God’s presence begins to awaken within us. More and more often, we start to feel him acting through us, we begin to see him in our life as it unfolds before us, and we start to see and hear him in and through others. Over time, with practice and grace, God-consciousness becomes the rule, not the exception. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

The heartache of the spiritual path

The spiritual life does not save us from heartache or suffering. It opens us up to experience life more fully. By choosing to live with an open heart, we are choosing both joy and sadness, pleasure and pain, connection and heartbreak. We get it all. 

Whether we know it or not, when we step onto the spiritual path, we are making a decision to feel everything, to experience everything. As a spiritual director once told me, “Unfortunately, we do not get to selectively numb. We can feel everything or nothing.” Openness is a package deal.

But it’s hard. Living with an open heart is hard. Love is hard. People we care about pass away, some betray or abandon us, and others disappoint us and let us down. And, in spite of this, we have to keep going. 

People who were on the path before us, who once led, guided, and accompanied us, they sometimes fall off or walk away, or they may simply stop seeking. They stop growing. Likewise, people we entered onto this journey along side, or met along the way, may not stay with us for the long haul. We are lucky if they do, but chances are they won’t. 

Quite often what feels like a parallel path of lifelong companionship turns out to be only a brief meeting at a crossroads. Even the deepest connections, connections that feel eternal, may not last but a moment before we are pulled by God or self in different directions. And parting hurts. 

If we are dedicated to this path, however, if we have chosen to love and seek God above all else, we must keep going. For those of us who long so deeply for divine connection with the infinite and eternal source of all things that nothing else will suffice, we must continue on the path even, or perhaps especially, when it gets lonely. We must walk in faith with our broken hearts toward the one who heals all wounds. 

But it’s not going to be easy. Easy was never the promise anyway. It’s going to be real. It’s going to be true. It’s going to be meaningful. It’s going to be rewarding. It’s going to be fulfilling. But it’s not going to be easy. 

This hardened world will break our fragile hearts, but as the late Leonard Cohen said, “That’s how the light gets in.” 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Fumbling into spirituality

When I was first getting clean and sober over twenty seven years ago, I was told that I had an illness for which the only known treatment was a spiritual experience, a complete personality transformation through the development of a conscious contact with a higher power. Up until this point, I’m not sure I’d ever even heard the word spiritual before, let alone understood what it meant to have a spiritual experience. I did have some concept of God from going to church as a kid and I knew about religion in a general sense, but spirituality was entirely new territory for me. 

This newness may be one of the reasons I was attracted to, or at least not opposed to, this idea that felt revolutionary to me. At that point in my life, religion scared me and I had rejected the idea of God as a teenager, but I was willing, mostly through pain and desperation, to take a shot at this thing called spirituality. And I feel very fortunate that the person helping me at the time, my spiritual director, so to speak, never pushed his own beliefs on me. Rather, he introduced me to a variety of spiritual and religious ideas, books, and teachings, and encouraged me to find my own way. 

In the beginning, however, this all confused me, as I thought I had to construct a higher power for myself from all of the different source material I was studying. I tried to take a little bit from here and a little bit from there, keeping what I liked and ignoring or discarding what I didn’t. It was as if I was working on my own Create-A-God kit with the hope of coming up with a higher power I could trust and rely on. It wasn’t until much later when I realized that, if God is anything, he isn’t what I want or imagine him to be. He is what and who he is, beyond my limitations, expectations, and understanding. 

All of this to say, my first steps onto the spiritual path were clumsy to say the least. I was like a man fumbling around in the dark for a light-switch, bumping into furniture, tripping on the carpet, and knocking over lamps along the way. But the beautiful thing about the spiritual path, especially in the beginning, is that it is broad and forgiving, leaving room for mistakes, misunderstandings, and missteps, and I made many. 

In hindsight, I see that God’s grace allowed me this time of discovery. My curiosity and sincerity have always been rewarded by him with the love and understanding of a patient father, even if sometimes I tested the limits of this patience and he let me know it. But God is forgiving – it’s a good thing too because I have done and continue to do plenty for which I have needed forgiveness – and the longer I walk this path, the more I can feel the truth of this. All he asks is that, whether we call it spirituality, religion, or something more specific, we step forward in faith. If we do this, he will always be there to help us up when we fall. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.