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Leaping into a happiness not yet realised

 


When I go to the hills, along with my rucksack full of the usual, I often take with me something I'm mulling over...the hills are a good place to mull. It could be a decision,  a project, a passage from the bible, a new idea I'd just come across, or as in the case today something I'd been reading recently that had rocked me back on my heels.  A FB pal Graham (we are yet to actually meet!) had kindly sent me a wonderful book for Christmas: Backpacking with the Saints .

I had just been challenged yesterday to  give myself to Joy in the full awareness of all the unrealised joys in my life.  To embrace felicity (bliss) despite a world of endlessly unmet needs.  The author is referencing Thomas Traherne an Anglican priest, mystic and poet from the 1600's who had a very intense spirituality and an amazing way with words.  He believed that God himself recklessly participated in unfulfilled desires and that in the Cross He assumes the pain of all our thwarted hopes and unfulfilled longings into his own love.   We are called then to leap with God into a happiness not yet realised but firmly rooted in Gods’ relentless passion of love.

It's heady stuff indeed and you can see why I needed a bit of space  and clear mountain air to mull it all over! At the risk of over simplification there is a profound truth in what Traherne is saying and he is in good company in drawing our attention to this.    Down through the centuries many great saints have discovered that in desiring God to want is to have, that wanting is everything in the spiritual life, more important than having.   Such a kind of catch and release spirituality is essential to celebrating our world which is full of wonders we will never be able to own...but we can enjoy them...to the full!  The actual experience of wanting itself is a gift that opens us up to what God may be wanting to give us.

So often we focus on our unrealised joys, our thwarted yearnings, our unmet needs and expect little from life or from God.  This can bring our horizon in so close that there is hardly any sunlight in our lives anymore.   We come to live with a winter sun that just breaks the skyline for a few hours and have forgotten the expansive long days of summer, the promises of God.

To choose to leap into a happiness not yet realised, or to choose joy when so much remains unmet is not some Pollyanna way of looking at the world.  It is choosing to believe that in the cross God himself meets us in all the provisional and fraught nature of our lives and to make that our starting point.  We do this by allowing ourselves to desire him, and not closing our hearts off in case we are disappointed.  For it is in such desire that we are most fully alive and closest to God.  As that other great mystical saint, Bernard of Clairvaux, said: The one who seeks for God has already found Him.


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