During Lent we often consider what discipline we want to practice to bring us closer to God, our neighbor and ourselves. I have found that life tends to give me the practice to follow each Lent. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been reflecting on and seeking to cooperate with a kind of transformation that wants to happen in me. This Lent, my life has been calling me to give up an old identity as victim and take on a new identity in God.
Thomas Merton used the phrase, “a hidden wholeness” to describe the identity in God that he saw in all things and all persons.
Those of us who are familiar with our inner critic (and who isn’t) might have a hard time entertaining any kind of wholeness in ourselves. The critic constantly tells us how we don’t live up to who we ought to be. Many of us have tried to “make ourselves better” for most of our lives without many tangible results. The surprise of this hidden wholeness is that it isn’t something we attain, but rather, something given to us at our birth. It is already within and around us, but we don’t perceive it. Slowly, through our life experiences, we may come to discover this treasure in us.
Ironically, one of the ways we discover this hidden wholeness is by hitting bottom, “falling into grace” as Ted Dunn puts it. This falling into grace is an experience of “transformation from life, through death, to new life again.” (The Inner Work of Transformation, p. 84.) When our plans fall apart, our self-made supports fall away and our old patterns no longer serve us, we may experience that we are held by something larger. In those experiences of death and resurrection, we may discover treasures within us that we hadn’t known were there: perseverance, humility, wisdom, gentleness, kindness, compassion, beauty, love, a hidden wholeness. From the discovery of these treasures within and around us new life springs up.
Communities also have a hidden wholeness within them, treasures that give them life. This Lenten season, I am also reflecting on the treasures of the monastery and its communities that will carry us into the future.
As we move toward Easter, I invite you to reflect with me on your own experiences of falling into grace, moving from life through death to new life to discover the treasures hidden within you. You might also reflect on how those treasures come to life in you as you participate in the life of the monastery. We all exist in the hidden wholeness of the Divine. We go forward on this journey together, as Benedict says, “with God’s good gifts which are in us” (Prol. 6).
Have a Blessed Easter!