The Deepening Way

2021 December blog by Kim Langley ~ It’s December, the time when the body wants to hunker down and the soul explores once again the rhythm of short days, long nights, cold wind.

I’ve been thinking even more than usual about hope this Advent. For most of my life, “hope” was inevitably followed in my mind and my prayer by “for.” Always “hope for.” Hope was for the best outcome, for the highest good of loved ones in travail, or hope for an increase in whatever virtue I was most heavily engaged with at the moment – perhaps patience, perhaps acceptance, perhaps a deeper desire to embrace a still center and sit quietly in the Holy Dark.

And those were good hopes. They made me who I am and I am grateful for them. Still I notice that my ruminations this year have less to do with the things I hope will change and more to do with learning to love what is. The waiting, hoping themes of Advent this year are now more intimately connected with accepting that this is the world, the one we have. The only way to live in it is to love it.

This Advent season I hear the invitation to allow myself to be hollowed out, then to lean into Love just as God leans into Love.

Mary and Joseph and the baby begin an apprenticeship together in how to love the world in all its beauty and brokenness. They are displaced and they make a home. They find rejection and hospitality. They enfold us in their story, and we watch them meet uncertainty with resilience and active hope.

I’ve been spending time with a poem called A Blessing for the Inward Way by Tracy Shaw. It is an expansive vision, for me, of growing toward the Divine.

May you find the womb space at the center of your Life,
There grow wise in the sacred rhythm
Of filling and emptying, emptying and filling…

So may you grow ever more intimate
With the inward way, the deepening way…
At one with the mystery, at one.