Through our many struggles and challenges, perfect Love guides us home.
“I’m not coming with you,” my dad told me when I came to pick him up. Dee was snug in an easy chair with the TV on low – something good was cooking in the kitchen. I had left him with a carer that morning while I raced around arranging for me to be his legal guardian. Because of his dementia, I was the only thing he could remember anymore, and it took me 15 minutes of reassuring to convince him to get up and come with me, home.
When we are navigating unknown challenges, easy comfort can lull us into a false sense of contentment, like where Dee was. The illusory programs of pleasure and esteem, power and control, and safety and security can become like comfy chairs that we do not want to leave. What helps us find our way home?
For Dee, that day, I held his hand. I talked with him and reassured him that our home was somewhere else and I wanted him to come so we could be together. He trusted me because of our shared love. For the rest of us struggling with a similar sense of unknowing, strengthening our relationship with divine Love helps us see through the illusory programs of happiness. As Thomas Merton tells us, our love relationship with God is the ground of our being and our spiritual journey’s North Star. Love lets us “experience in our own hearts the intimate personal secret” of God, he says. “So that He may in this manner enter our hearts and dwell in them as a personal presence.” [1] We strengthen our closeness with divine Love every time we practice Centering Prayer as we consent to God’s loving presence and action within us. Through our many struggles and challenges, perfect Love guides us home. Dee took the chance to break away from his state of comfort and go with me into the unknown that day, because he trusted in me and our love for each other. We can do the same by trusting in True Love, whom we find within.
[1] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New York: New Directions, 1962, 154.