For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
— Colossians 3:3

Hidden in Christ, I rise.
I leave the tomb of freedom
and emerge 
awakened to Love.
For an eternal moment,
I tasted the completeness of it,
the exquisite settledness of myself
in all that is.

Yet I rise tethered
to a graced discontent.
That eternal moment remains hidden in me,
but I cannot live out my intention
to abide there.

And so I pray,
that I will not break faith
with my awakened heart.

Though I lose you,
you never lose me.

Though I turn away,
I can turn again
and find you
right here.

So, in this way then, we start to see that as I start to have faith in my moments of awakening, I will not break faith with my awakened heart. In my most childlike hour, in the arms of the beloved, reading the child the good night story; in the pause between two lines of a poem, lying awake at night, listening to the rain, I was intimately accessed by a fullness without which my life will be forever incomplete. And having tasted it, I’m incomplete without it, but I, by my own finite powers, cannot find my way to abide in it. This is the graced discontent of the seeker; that one was granted something, and I will not break faith with my awakened heart . . .

And I also know, the intuition is, that in this moment, it isn’t as if something more was given to me, but a curtain opened and the infinite love that’s always been given to me, it touched me. And so, I then seek to know how can I then learn to accept in humility that actually I tend to get absorbed in my obsessions over what I think is the meaning of it all, and I catch myself imposing of it upon myself, the very dilemma I can’t bear. And here I am. Here I am.

And then Merton says that it doesn’t matter very much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things. We’re staying in the joy of the cosmic dance, which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us for it beats in our very blood whether we want it to or not. — James Finley, Turning to the Mystics Thomas Merton Meditation 1

Credits and References:
“Wheat” by FarbenfroheWunderwelt. Used with permission.

© Esther Hizsa, An Everyday Pilgrim, 2021.
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without permission from Esther Hizsa is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used provided there is a link to the original content and credit is given as follows: © Esther Hizsa, An Everyday Pilgrim 2013-2021.  http://www.estherhizsa.com