Conversion Series II
A way of life that has become customary to us is to live stretched out, stretched out towards the future; generally toward diverse purposes in various areas of our life. Multiple desires form images of ideal situations and towards them we set out, usually in haste.
How does this start? It is a habit acquired through the family, the media, and culture in general. We observe our vital situation through the prism of likes and dislikes. To each perception we add a “like” or a “I don’t like” or a “more or less … but better if it were” … What we observe in social networks and in almost all media, this “like” or “dislike” to what appears is actually a reflection of what was already happening in us. We perceive taking position, adding our personal imprint, adhering or rejecting. This is not perceiving. This is desiring. We live desiring.
We live pulled by the shortcomings, almost all apparent. They are seldom such. This is neither bad nor good, it is a mode of operation very typical of the biological that aims to achieve the best environmental conditions to ensure the survival of the organism. However the life of the spirit is different. It is above all an attentive look. From there you can observe the situations and also the desires that appear as part of it. But it remains at a distance. There is an openness to the teaching that events bring as a result of the omnipresent will of God. The supreme mystery is revealed through what happens and reveals meanings accessible to the spiritual senses.
To see, we must leave what we want in parentheses. Allowing presence to manifest. Fast from appetites and from the many desires, not repressing but witnessing. This transforms them into perceived objects and strips them as simple impulses that come and go. There is no reason to live life at the expense of those variable winds and be subjected to their whim. Otherwise we are never more than stretched to where we think we are going. There is nothing wrong in heading towards some goal, in having some planning; the problem is in living beyond here; in extracting the vital force of an imagined future instead of a current now and in that sense, more true and truthful.
Where do we go? What do we despair of achieving? A sensation without a doubt. Feeling of peace, well-being and fullness. What if what we are looking for was already present but hidden precisely because of that inauthentic way of living? What if the problem was not in what I lack in this or that area of life but in my way of being and being? If this were so, if the center of the question were my mode of existence; the solution should necessarily come from within. Sometimes grace manifests itself as a deep understanding that allows for genuine and stable conversion. Or a radical fall into account may occur that draws back the veils, causes the surrender of fantasies and the air becomes clean as on a fresh morning.
The meaning of life does not derive from a purpose in the midst of unappealable finitude or diverse goals to be achieved. Meaning is something that runs through life right now and remains unchanged, available and abundant. They have called it the awakening of the spiritual senses; also The Christ of the heart or the light of the Holy Spirit. Beyond names and forms, it is an unmistakable presence that transfigures the world.
It sounds good but it seems somehow disconnected from my reality. How to bring it from words to my own reality? …
The Holy Name 