Seeking reverence

I came to seminary to become reverent.

It wasn’t so much that I wasn’t spiritual or reverent before. In fact, my adult life has been spent in the comfort and the confines of the woods. My remote area has afforded me the option to spend my years revolving around a small axis, removed from the commercial world, opting for silence instead of the bustle of twentieth-century living.

While it’s true that I ventured out on a daily basis to fulfill my responsibility to the community through the publication of a newspaper, my actions circled around a life of service and not material goods or concepts.

I liked it that way -- in fact I liked it so much that when it became apparent that I had positioned myself as a community minister, I wished to be further identified as a spiritual person and leader in an outwardly obvious way. I came to seminary seeking the state and the title of reverend.

To me, reverend is a commitment to an other-than-self reference. To me, reverend is maintaining at all times an understanding, a relationship and a dedication to the Spirit of God in daily living. To me, reverend is a mindfulness that places at the center a commitment to say, “yes” to the presence of divine mystery. To me, reverend is surrendering worldly attachment to an unworthy self-history.

And that has been the toughest challenge. How do we surrender worldly attachments to an unworthy self-history? How do we stop ourselves from our inner dialog about how we’re not smart enough, or disciplined enough, or committed enough, or don't have enough time to think that we are “children of God,” unique individuals with the power and the intention to make a difference in our troubled world?

Howard Thurman, in his essay on commitment in “Disciplines of the Spirit,” sets up an argument that within our living universe, life itself is alive and that aliveness expresses itself in goal seeking. He argues that life has a determination to actualize its unique potential.

He quotes German mystic Meister Eckhart, who espouses that there is an inherent determination upon which God enters a man’s life. Eckhart writes that to the extent that man rids himself of creatureliness, to that extent God must enter his life. “I never ask God to give himself to me, I beg him to purify, to empty me. If I am empty, God of his very nature is obliged to give himself to me to fill me.”

But what does this mean in terms of becoming reverent?

For me, it means coming to an unshakeable belief that all is as it should be. It means making sure that all decisions, all actions, stems from a place of commitment to a higher self-good. It means participating in a self-surrendering practice that moves energy away from the mind and down into one’s heart and soul. It means practicing a mindfulness that has at its core an essence that our live journey is to learn the lessons of earth in relation and in honor of a life-giving and all-loving expression of wonder.

Thurman writes, “The yielding of the center of consent may be a silent, slow development in the life. The transformation may be so gradual that it passes unnoticed until, one day, everything is seen as different.

With five week left of this "away from home" seminary experience, I can only hope it is so.