Re-turn, re-member

There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there's a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you, and I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.

John O'Donohue ~ speaking on Being

I've seen the word 'quiet' enough in the last little while to get the hint and so I've tried to carve out quietness without spinning my mind into madcap schemes. I've been thinking and writing recently about how to inhabit my life, how to belong. I'm also learning that healing comes from the inside out, that if we think that at our core we are broken and wounded then we're not digging deep enough, not letting truth seep deep enough to reach the centre where we are made in the image of God, where we are whole. I keep coming back to a little etymology that I discovered a few months ago, that religion comes from re-ligare, to reconnect. It seems that most if not all the words related to faith ought to have re- at the beginning of them. Faith is a homecoming.

So this took me back to thinking about finding my place, my belonging, seeking to inhabit. I often live in one place with one eye on where I'll go next, as if I might find belonging further along my journey. I'm trapped by a linear metaphor. I realized that if I incorporate re-ligion, then I already belong. I am already loved. Here. Now. To accept faith is to reconnect with the belonging and love that we already have, that is already a part of us. Our journey doesn't take us anywhere except to reorient us to see the belonging and love and faith that is a part of us but that we may have lost. God is not hidden, but is already running towards us, filled with compassion, to throw wide arms around us, encircle us and kiss us. We are prodigal in our own lives. This is not linear. This is not A to B.

So then I got to thinking well wait just a minute, then, whose map is this that I thought I lived on the edge of? It's not the route that isn't mine, it's the map. This isn't my map. Who says I live on the edges of the map? I live in the centre of the map, the centre of my map, me and God. I will spare you the expletives that accompanied every other word in my sentences when I made this realization, but it was a huge shift.
My map is circular, not linear; it has no edge. This is my map.

And here's one I made in the snow.

God is nearer to you than any thoughts or feelings of yours...Do not be afraid. If all the evil things in the universe were around us, they could not come inside the ring that He makes about us. He always keeps a place for Himself and His child, into which no other being can enter.

George Macdonald (quoted in Celtic Daily Prayer)