Longing for a Glorious World
For this time of Lent, we are inviting our ICN community to embrace a time of grief and glory. Each week, we are offering reflections and practices on grief, glory, and their integration, as a way of evolving our participation in this season.
We’ll focus on one beatitude and one word as pathways of mystical practice—now with a more global focus. We encourage you to hold and engage with them throughout the week ahead.
We hold in the divine womb our personal struggles and fears alongside our dreams and unique soul calling. We hold our collective pain and loss alongside our communal nurturing and creativity. And we hold our global crises and suffering alongside our deep courage and ultimate faith. We invite you into this collective womb space/time of painful lament and generative possibility.
May we walk with grace together in this season of grief and glory, through the Mystery and portal of death and resurrection.
Longing
Our word and primary invitation for this week is holding longing.
I invite you to pause and speak the word aloud several times. As you hear it spoken with your own voice, where does it land in your body? Where do you feel the word longing touch you within?
Remain in that felt sense.
Let it deepen into your body, not thinking about it, but first receiving it in your heart, your spiritual womb, your feet, or any other part of you where you sense it touching.
Open to the energy it is bringing awareness to in you.
Stay with your inner process as long as you need.
Glorious Longing
Lent is often practiced as a time of waiting. We all have seasons of life that are about waiting. We have seasons that feel like preparation or support for something yet to come. In these times, we can fall into the posture of simply enduring. We live in the resistance of just waiting for the time to pass, for the season to be over. For Easter and resurrection to come. Then things will be ok.
Or we can hold the times of anticipation with an eager hope. With a glorious longing.
Of course, no moment or season of life is auxiliary. Every day is precious and brings a gift we are invited to receive. If we are too future-oriented in our waiting or our longing, we’ll end up missing our lives. As Rumi said, “Let your love dissolve also into this season’s moment, or when it’s over, you’ll buy lamp after lamp to find it!”
One of the gifts of cyclical/sacred time like Lent is that it invites us to stay with our longing, to stay with our waiting, to stay with our pain for 40 days. This particular length of time is not about counting a specific number of days but rather symbolically represents an amount of time that signifies “completion.” In other words, don’t count down the days until it is over, but remain in the waiting, the pain, the grief, the longing until the time of completion arrives.
In our engagement with cyclical time, this completion comes on Easter Sunday. The completion may come on this day in a week—or perhaps not for another year and a week. Or longer. And it has already come many times over, in the world and in us. We’ll consider this “now and not yet” more in our reflections next week.
When we live into the immediacy of our present longing, not pulling us so much into the future but intensifying and enriching the now in its depth of potentiality, we are bringing to bear the coming glory of God into this world of pain and suffering.
When we stay with the reality of suffering and honor our pain—and the pain of the world—holy longing is born. It is “holy” because it comes from the whole, from the divine wholeness that lacks nothing.
This longing does not come from denial or strategies to fix. It does not arise from avoidance or running from our pain. Rather, holy longing is born out of the depth of our engagement with the reality of grief, suffering, and loss.
From the groundspring of lament irrupts the longing for a more beautiful world we know is possible. The longing for the glory of divine wholeness to burst forth in the here and now.
We hunger and thirst for righteousness. That is, we find ourselves starving for authentic, holistic peace/shlama/wholeness. This is our holy longing for justice, for right relationship. A rightness of ultimate belonging and all having a good and right place at the table of the world. A great and glorious harmony out of which a new humanity can be born—or resurrected.
We long for more because we know that there is more glory ready to come into fulfillment.
Blessed Are Those Who Long
Throughout this season, we are using Jesus’ teachings, often referred to as “The Beatitudes,” as pathways to help us walk with grief and glory. We offer various translations of the same beatitude, which illuminate the rich textures of meaning that are contained in the original Aramaic language Jesus would have spoken originally.
A Practice of Blessing
We invite you to receive these various translations as a meditative practice. Let your whole body receive them, slowly, absorbing them deeply. This might include thoughts about the words or phrases heard in a new way, but as those come, integrate them in your whole being, into the deeper spaces of your soul and embodied receiving.
This practice can also be done with a partner, reading aloud to each other. One person can read all of them, pausing between each for at least 30 seconds, and then the other does the same. Or you can each say the phrase aloud to one another, pausing to receive before going on to the next.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.
(KJV)
Fortunate are those who crave and long for a good place with God; they will find it.
(Greek Literal)
Healthy are those who turn their mouths to receive a new birth of universal stability; they shall be encircled by the birth of a new society.
Aligned with the One are those who wait up at night, weakened and dried out inside by the unnatural state of the world; they shall receive satisfaction.
Healed are those who persistently feel inside: “If only I could find new strength and a clear purpose on which to base my life.” They shall be embraced by birthing power.
Integrated, resisting delusion are those who long clearly for a foundation of peace between the warring parts of themselves; they shall find all around them the materials to build it.
(Aramaic)
Greek literal translations by Dave Brisbin
Aramaic translations by Neil Douglas-Klotz
The Longing Set Before Us
Eternal wellspring of peace –
May we be drenched with the longing for peace
that we may give ourselves over to peace
until the earth overflows with peace
as living waters overflow the seas.
– Marcia Falk
What do we truly long for from the depths of our being?
How do these longings interflow with the longings of others? With the collective groans and cries for justice, for mercy, for life?
How do we long with the world in lament and grief and also in hope and glory?
If we stay with our longing long enough, we might discover what it has to offer us.
This means that we aren’t looking for an outside “savior” to come fulfill our longings. The messiah we seek is not separate from ourselves.
Jesus rides into town on a donkey. He walks the path of descent. The pain of suffering and the great release of death lie before him. They lie before us.
Jesus points the way back to us. The kingdom of heaven is within/among you. You are the body of Christ, which is broken for all.
In our vulnerability, we can be open to long from the place of all that we are lacking and missing, from our wounds and our losses.
In deep lament with the world, we can come to the roots of our own longings which spring forth from a universal sorrow—from which also flows the joy of wholeness from the ultimate Source.
In mercy, we can find our longing enfolded in the womb of God, the nurturing faith and trust in our collective gestating and birthing that which has not yet come into form.
In a deep and expansive belonging, we can discover the longing sprung from the heart of the earth and from the body of Christ, the divine wholeness to which we all belong.
We are one, after all, you and I;
together we suffer, together exist,
and forever will recreate each other.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We hold our longings, and the great longings of the world, in the mystery of grace.
We embrace them in deep acceptance and abiding faith.
We trust in our divine power for enaction, now and in the days to come.
And we trust in the way of the cross. To walk the path of Jesus. To be willing to give up all in devotion and love. To release and to let go. And to believe in—to long for—the great hope of glory before us.
Death and Resurrection await.
Image by Dalmo Mendonça
We invite you into your own deep process with this season, engaging in reflection and practice with these themes and experiences.
Questions for Reflection
1. What are your deepest longings? Where do you feel each of them in your body? When you tune into them within, underneath the idea of their fulfilment, how would you describe their felt sense and energetic substance?
2. How do your longings tap into wider and deeper collective longings? For our communities and for the world?
3. What longings are you being invited to embrace more intently? What longings are you being invited to release and let go of?