January 1, The Eighth Way: Humility

Part of the Series The Twelve Days of Christmas as Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Connection with God.

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by Nina Matthews Photography

You seek God, but the further you go on this journey, the more you keep bumping into yourself.  

Let's say you decide to take a few minutes and enter the quiet of prayer; you descend into your heart and journey further toward the intimacy with God you desire.  But the moment you do, a riot breaks out within you.  Your mind jumps to life and your thoughts leap around inside your brain like a bunch of monkeys on crack.  

You've come face to face with your ego.

The ego is not pride; rather it's the self-managing faculty within you whose job it's been to take care of you all these years.  The ego's not bad; it just thinks it's God.  So when you begin to seek God in earnest, it's not amused.  It doesn't mind you being religious---if you're religious, it's still in charge telling you how to be good, condemning you when you're not, and reminding you of all the rules you ought to keep.

So long as the ego still rules the roost, you'll never really know God.  Your ego can know all about God but that doesn't mean you know God.  What you know of God is simply a surrogate for the real thing.  

To advance in the spiritual life your ego must be humbled, and that's no easy task.  "Humility," someone's said, "is not thinking less of yourself; it's thinking of yourself less."  But that's precisely what the ego can't handle.  When you seek God earnestly, it will holler and scream at you, and will try to distract you with a parade of ugly thoughts, fears, even the most beautiful things in the world.

When it does, don't give up; all this means you're moving in the right direction.  Concentrate on the light you seek.  You're humbling your ego; you're un-selfing yourself.  God awaits behind the idol of your humbled ego.  Humility, then, is the beginning of wisdom.  But know this: it will get darker before it gets lighter; you'll feel more like a fool before you feel wise.  You've entered the narrow gate and the way is hard (Matthew 7.13-14).  Only a few walk this way.  

Today, rather than just letting my thoughts rule the roost, I'll take a few moments and watch them without following where they want to take me.  That ought to infuriate my ego . . . in a good way.

December 31, The Seventh Way: Words

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by Ian Ozsvald

Part of the Series The Twelve Days as Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Connection with God.

You will, of course, want to pray along the way--that is, you'll find yourself wanting to speak words to God and about God.  Prayer, you think, is about words, and yes, you're right.  It is about words, there's no escaping that.  But prayer is so much more than words.

In truth, you've been praying all along--from before you awakened to your deep desire or desperation to follow this start to the End.  Prayer is not merely asking God for things.  It's not just using nice words to massage the Divine.  It may include these things, but prayer is essentially your awareness of God, your presence to the Presence.  It's not merely the mind or mouth in motion.  Prayer is an awakened heart, an interior awareness of God.  This is why the Bible often shows how the mind and mouth are made dumb--stone silent--when God shows up (Habakkuk 2.20 and Mark 9.7 are just two of many examples).

The problem with words is that we tend to become hypnotized by them.  First, we form them and then they form us.  We think that once we've attached a label to something we know what it is.  But consonants and vowels can't fully explain a flower, let alone its Maker.  I think that's why God played coy with Moses and gave him a riddle for the Divine Name rather than a label.  "I'm not going to give you a label by which you can think you've got Me figured out," said God.  "Just call me 'I Am Who I Am," (Exodus 3.14).  God wasn't going to let Moses or anyone else think that because he could utter a few sacred words, he had God figured out, tamed, or employed in some great cause.  God's too big for that.

Of course, you must use words with God, and words have a beauty of their own.   But the trick is not to be tricked by them.  You must not misuse them or attach too much too them or over-identify with the words themselves.  If you do, you'll be liable to reduce prayer to mere words and miss the Word Itself.  

So, when you speak to God or about God, don't babble or drone on and on (Matthew 6.7).  Instead, take up a Psalm or little twig of Scripture and lay it on the fire of your growing love for God.  Let those simple words guide your words, and improvise on them if you wish.  "But take care," says God, "and don't get too attached to words; their only aim is to light the way to Me." 

Today, I'll not heap up empty phrases.  Instead, I'll light a small fire on the hearth of my heart.  A few sacred words are all I'll need for kindling.

December 30, The Sixth Way: Desert

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by Moyan_Brenn

Part of the Series The Twelve Days as Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Connection with God.

You're walking now.  It's night.  Away from the city lights you're more able to perceive the haunting beauty of the landscape around you.  As you do, two things begin to happen to you.

First, with each step you take farther on and deeper in, you sense a growing anticipation rising within you.  In your heart, there's a growing conviction that you've finally set out on the one journey that truly matters; you're pursuing the Ultimate, the Absolute, the Source and Goal of all life.  All you were made for and destined to be lies at the end of this journey, bathed in the pure radiance of the star's bright light.

Second, you notice you've begun to enter a new and strange land you've never seen before, never even known existed.  The familiar landmarks are gone.  You've moved off the map.  You're lost to all except the light of the star.  Anticipation emboldens you, but the strangeness of this new land unnerves you.

If you've not know something of this eagerness and nervousness, you've not gone far enough on the spiritual journey; your praying's been too safe.  At some point, all who seek God must find themselves carried into some kind of desert experience, for the desert is the furnace of transformation.  In the desert, we're stripped of all we've carried but do not need.  In the desert, we're stripped down, relieved of burdens and attachments, until the only thing remaining is the nakedness of the heart's pure trust in God.  All we've valued, all we've used to justify ourselves, prove ourselves, make ourselves worthy and lovable and useful is irrelevant here.  All we thought we needed to survive, we don't need.  Only one thing is needed, and That can never be taken from us. 

This is the very reason why every spiritual "athlete" from Abraham to Mother Theresa was pressed by the Holy Spirit into the desert.  Welcome.  You've now joined them.

Today, I'll acknowledge that the desert frightens me and I don't easily surrender all I've accumulated up to this point.  But I know I must not avoid the desert and its healing, liberating power of I'm to find what I'm looking for.  

December 29, The Fifth Way: Walking

Part of the Series The Twelve Days as Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Connection with God.

Most of us live life mostly in our heads, but our thoughts are not where real life is lived.  Your thoughts may be memories of real experience, they may imagine experience yet to come, but they're not real experience.  They're interpretations of the past and projections of what may come.  They're illusions really, fantasies.  Powerful, to be sure, but not ultimately real no matter how much they'd like to persuade you otherwise.

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by Brian Smithson

The only life you can live is the one that's coming to you right now.  Jesus said, "Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own" (Matthew 6.34).  You cannot meet God in the past or in the future, but only in the present.  So, you must find a way to live here, now, "taking every thought captive" as St. paul taught (2 Corinthians 10.5).

This is why walking is a spiritual practice.

When you walk on the earth, your feet touch the ground.  You awaken more fully to your senses.  And your senses root you to this moment.  But you can't be in this moment when you're galloping along, eyes fixed on the future (or fleeing the past) lost in your anxious, calculating, or ambitious thoughts.

You're a wise a woman, a wise man, when you regularly get down off your high horse or lumbering camel, get out of your head, and walk the real earth for a while, aware of what's right around you.  The feet of the God you aim to meet walked this earth; yours ought to as well.

Today, I'll take off my shoes and feel the ground beneath my feet.  I'll wiggle my toes in the carpet, stroll in a garden, or walk into the kitchen or to the copier at work---and I'll pay attention while I'm doing so.  Remember, "the place beneath your feet is holy ground" (Exodus 3.5).

How to leave a lasting legacy: die well

How will you die? I don’t mean what will kill you; I mean what will be the character of your life in those final days before your passing?

Of course, we don’t have much control over when and how we’ll die. A few of us will go quickly, without much warning or preparation. But most of us will have some time, and our wits about us, for a few days, a handful of weeks, six or more months of living with a terminal illness, maybe more.

The centuries-old Book of Common Prayer contains a prayer that says, “Lord, spare me from dying suddenly and unprepared.” Most of us today want the opposite. “Take me quick, Lord.”

But when we go quickly, we miss the opportunity to die well. And the ability to die well gives us the opportunity to leave a lasting legacy.

I have a friend whose mother’s dying. She’s lived with dying for seven months. But the fact of her dying didn’t mean she stopped playing tennis, going to the opera, visiting with friends, and nurturing her children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. She’s dying well. Last month she took her four adult children to Ireland for one last trip together. Last weekend, she took the whole family (dozens of them) to the opera . . . “Because I love it.” And now that she’s stopped eating, she’s started blessing each and every one of her kin . . . with intention. She’s dying well, really well.

So, if you’re “spared from dying suddenly and unprepared,” how will you spend your last days?

If you don’t take this question seriously, you’ll do very little to prepare yourself for dying. Then when death comes for you, you’ll not be able to live big, give love, let go with dignity, and as you do, inspire, empower, and envision others to live their lives with some special gift that comes from your dying. And if you can’t live well when you’re dying, I wonder how well you’re really living now.

Intention: Today, I’ll consider the kind of person I’d like to be when I’m dying. Then I’ll begin to live in such a way that when the end comes, I’ll have something beautiful in my soul to pass on to others. God, make it so that when I’m dying I can give to others some gift to help them live well so that when they find themselves at death's door, they can pass on gifts of grace to others.