“The one journey that ultimately matters is the journey into the place of stillness deep within one’s self. To reach that place is to be at home; to fail to reach it is to be forever restless. In [contemplative prayer] we catch a vision of not only what is, but what can be. Contrary to what we have thought, contemplatives are the great doers.”
N. Gordon Cosby
The Journey of faith is a twofold journey: it is a journey inward and it is a journey outward.
The inward journey is the starting point, the infinite steps that have no end…towards God, others and ourselves; it is a journey that goes on for the ages. This inward journey leads then to the outward journey, the journey of self in service to God, others and the earth.
The key that unlocks this journey is prayer but is found in the ordinariness of life – the practice of the dailiness of our days. For not many of us live on the mountain top all year round, no, for many of us there are dishes and diapers and bills and demons and darkness, fragile faith and nagging doubts. But God is greater than all of these and thus we are immersed in the Divine every moment of our existence. We are given, lovingly, the power to choose to recognize the very sacredness of our existence in every Moment. With God there is no past, or future, there is only now for time is a human construct. God is timeless and when we are in the now, we are indeed one with the Infinite Love.
Prayer allows us to enter into the emptiness of silence where we are awakened to the fullness of God and to the power of prayer to mold us into a people of relentless love, messy grace, and compassionate service.
It is this silence that feeds the journey inward and the journey outward, and it is in this twofold journey that leads us to a divine banquet, one where we can taste our lives as a holy space where God and flesh meet, the place where the boundary between the sacred and the profane dissolves and all is wrapped in the warm tenderness of God’s love.
Author’s Note: I first learned of and experienced this naming of the journey as both inward and outward when I was a member of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC back in the 1990s.
For more information on this journey, please click on the link (www.inwardoutward.org). And to read the book that inspired such missions and fed my soul deeply please see the book by Elizabeth O’Connor, Journey Inward, Journey Outward. It can be purchased online at Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/Journey-Inward-Outward-Elizabeth-OConnor/dp/0060663324)
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