California Roll

Restless

    This morning I awakened with a vague restlessness. I've recited portions of the Bible to myself, prayed by myself and prayed with Colin. Then I picked up a book whIch was was just what I needed. I want to share more great quotes from that book, one I cited in my blog yesterday, The Holy Longing by Ronald Rolheiser.
    "To understand our sexuality and to live with its unfulfilled tensions, it can be most helpful simply to understand this. In loving, the ultimate wound is not to be able to marry everyone.  The greatest human hunger, felt in every cell in our being, is that we cannot be completely united with everyone and everything." (p. 206)
     I feel the pain of separation from my teenage daughters - physically here with me, but not emotionally with me as when they were young. In this holiday season I've longed to be with so many dear friends from the past or my family.  I can't.   
    After all the Apostle Paul teaches us in the first chapter of Ephesians that the destiny of God's children is to come all together under the authority of Christ.  So of course while we are on earth we will be aching for this future outcome - to be all united.  In these words I find courage and meaning in the ache.
    Before Christ comes again, this longing is part of our life here. I often think that if I just had more friends or more time with friends or a better kind of friend, I wouldn't feel this sense of longing at times. No.  The longing is meant to drive me towards God, towards solitude which helps me encounter the presence of God. Henri Nouwen has written about how we move towards "restful solitude."  Here are four steps, again from Rolheiser's book, summarized from Nouwen's, Reaching Out -- the Three Movement of the Spiritual Life.

    1. "Own your pain and incompleteness"  -  i.e. nothing in this life will every fully complete us
    2. "Give up false messianic expectations" - i.e. the hope that somewhere, sometime, the right person or
                            situation or combination of the two will bring complete and steady happiness.
    3.  "Go inward" - go against our natural tendency towards activity to soothe the ache within.  Instead sit
                          still long enough to encounter God and let him change "restfulness to restlessness, 
                          compulsion to freedom ...heartache to empathy."   
    4.  "It is a movement that is never made once and for all"

    These are ideas that I need to keep returning to.  On Saturday Collin and I plan to take a couple of hours away from doing, away from the house and its tasks, turn off our cell phones, and draw close to God.  I have many decisions to make about what to give myself to in the coming year.  I hope to sense
how God is leading me and from that, what to say "no" to, what to say "yes" to.

"A Spirituality of Sexuality"

    The title of this posting comes from the ninth chapter of Ronald Rolheiser's book, The Holy Longing. I started this book several years ago, put it down, and just came back to it last night.  I found this chapter brilliant.  Here's some highlights.
    "The word "sex" has a Latin root, the verb secare.  In Latin, secare means (literally) "to cut off," "to sever," ..."to disconnect from the whole."  To be "sexed," therefore, literally means to be cut off...
    This is precisely how we wake up in the world.  We wake up in our cribs, not serene, but crying--lonely, cut off, severed from the great whole."
    Rolheiser then contrasts sexuality with genitality, defining sexuality as "an all-encompassing energy inside of us...It is the drive for love, communion, community, friendship, family affection, wholeness, consummation, creativity, self-perpetuation, immortality, joy, delight, humor and self-transcendence.... Genitality, having sex, is only one aspect of that larger reality of sexuality, albeit a very important one."
(p. 194-5)
    "Sexuality is not simply about finding a lover or even finding a friend.  It is about overcoming separateness by giving life and blessing it." (P. 198)

    I'd like to include here more of this fascinating theology of sexuality,  but I need to over come my own separatness!  I'll join my husband in shopping before the stores for our Korean meal for New Years Day.  By going at 8:10 am, we hope to avoid the lines at the grocery counter.