What we are calling soul-centered living is about living from the depths of our spirit and soul; but do not mistake that for denying the coarse realities of life. One of the dangers of thinking about “spiritual” matters is when we think that things that are “spiritual” are necessarily disembodied and otherworldly. If our spiritual maturity is going to affect our actual, real, flesh-and-blood, lived-out lives (and isn’t that what we want?), then we cannot divorce spirituality from the actualities of our real, flesh-and-blood, lived-out lives. And the truth is, our real lives often have to deal with darkness.
But that is not all bad. As Joan Chittister writes, “There is a light in us that only darkness itself can illuminate. It is the glowing calm that comes over us when we finally surrender to the ultimate truth of creation: that there is a God and we are not it... Then the clarity of it all is startling. Life is not about us; we are about the project of finding Life. At that moment, spiritual vision illuminates all the rest of life. And it is that light that shines in darkness.”
I love this idea: ‘We are about the project of finding Life.’ To surrender to reality is not just to accept it, but to accept it so that we can find the Truth and the Life in it - so that we can find GOD in it. If we are too busy living in the ‘oughts’ - how things ought to be, or how they ought to act, or what I ought to have done - then we miss out on the joy and the majesty and the mystery of now. If we are too busy wishing things were like they were back in the good ol’ days, or wishing that I had something that I do not, or getting too tied up in shoulda-coulda-woulda, we miss what God is up to right here, right now.
Chittister writes elsewhere: “Surrender does not simply mean that I quit grieving what I do not have. It means that I surrender to new meanings and new circumstances, that I begin to think differently and to live somewhere that is totally elsewhere. I surrender to meanings I never cared to hear — or heard, maybe, but was not willing to understand... Try as I might to turn back the clock, to relive a period of my life with old friends, in long-gone places, out of common memories, through old understandings and theologies of the past, I come to admit that such attempts are the myth of a mind in search of safer days. The way we were is over… Surrender is the crossover point of life. It distinguishes who I was from who I have become. Life as I had fantasized is over. What is left is the spiritual obligation to accept reality so that the spiritual life can really happen to me.”
Get real. This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. (Psalm 118:24)