This is the first of seven readings and questions to ponder for our fall Adult Spiritual Formation series “Embarking on the Spiritual Journey.” Please read and save this column. Spend some time reflecting on the questions, and jotting down your thoughts. Plan to gather after 9:30am worship on September 17^th for small group discussion. Material is drawn from pages 12-18 of “An Invitation to the Spiritual Journey” by The Rev. John P. Gorsuch, and is used with the generous permission of his family. For the introduction to and all seven issues of this series, please visit our website.

From his many years as a spiritual director, Jack Gorsuch found that people searching for God most often posed these questions: “How do I find you, God? How do I learn to open myself to you? Can I really trust that you are as good as others have said you are and as I have sometimes experienced you to be? In what ways do I resist you? Is the journey deeper into your life alien to my deepest needs or an adventure into a truer part of myself as well as into you? Where will you take me?”

These questions were evidence of that yearning for God that is coded into all humanity and perhaps all that lives and breathes on the earth. “There is that in us which knows that nothing created on the face of the earth can ever satisfy us the way God can. We reach toward fame, power, money, beauty, sex, and health, but we find that there is something in us that returns to that inner hunger which only God can satisfy because God put it there…There is that in human nature which is like a needle in a compass; we search for the spiritual dimension until we point north.”

Gorsuch asks the question “What is the spiritual life and who is it for?” He maintains the spiritual life is not the exclusive property of hermits and monastics. Because all people of every time and place have yearned for God (or something like God) then the spiritual life is for all people of every time and place. He reminds us that the word “religion” means “to link back.” “We are linked to the music of the spheres, and even the most deaf among us doesn’t hear something.”

Gorsuch defines the spiritual life thus: “…a stance toward life which believes every one of us is meant to wake up so that more and more everything cries out “God” for us. As Thomas Merton says, we are part of a glorious cosmic dance which is always going on. It beats in the blood of all of us even if we don’t know it. The purpose of the spiritual life is to help us learn how to remove the obstacles that stand between us and the union we already have with God. This means that we don’t search for something that is foreign to us but uncover that which is already here.”

Gorsuch continues, “I believe St Paul was exactly right when he said we live and move and have our being in the divine life. The holy is present to everybody, not just a few sanctified souls. In the great spiritual traditions of the world the image of waking from sleep is used to describe what happens when we become more aware, which means we don’t have to go somewhere else or be someone else to get the Holy One’s attention. We do, however, need to understand that our spiritual antennae are so full of static that we tune God out. If we could reduce the noise that is caused by what Thomas Keating calls our “false self system”—our hang-ups and distortions—we could begin to hear the great symphony of love that pours forth from the divine heart.”

Gorsuch believes God is “deeply imprinted on our souls, even if we have smothered this imprint over by skepticism, or by our warding off of the potential disappointment we might feel lest it be found wanting, or are so terribly worn down by living that we can barely remember its possibility.” He shares a story told by a colleague in which the colleague concluded, “My problem was not that I thought too highly of myself but that I did not think highly enough of myself. The next day, my [spiritual] director told me to imagine a host of angels going before me proclaiming, ‘Make Way for the Image of God.’”

“We are all made in that image,” says Gorsuch, “we all come from a larger homeland. We are more than we know and are part of more than we admit.” We can hear about that homeland from others, says Gorsuch, or we can travel there in person and experience it first-hand.” The spiritual journey is for those who wish to travel home.

QUESTIONS TO PONDER

1. In the first paragraph of this reading, Gorsuch lists some common questions people articulate as they search for God. Is there one of these questions you have found yourself asking? What sort of an answer have you found?

2. Gorsuch speaks of reaching toward fame, power, money, etc. to try and feed that inner hunger that it turns out only God can fill. In your life what is that you’ve reached toward hoping to be fed? When in your life did you first become aware of that inner hunger, and when did you come to understand that it is God alone who can fill that emptiness?

3. In different ways, Gorsuch, Keating, and St Paul all describe union with God as something that already exists within us but that has become obscured by “static”, skepticism, exhaustion, or the false self. Can you identify what it is in you that has clouded over this divine union that already exists inside of you?

4. Close your eyes and richly imagine in detail this picture: a host of angels going before you and proclaiming, “Make Way for the Image of God.” What does that feel like?

SCRIPTURE TO CONSIDER

Luke 17: 21    The Kingdom of Heaven is within you