Looking through the glass which is me

Honesty. It is so necessary in our lives, our spiritual even more than our temporal. Honesty requires awareness. None of us can step back and look at ourselves and see what is really there. Not at first. It takes years of self-reflection, evaluation, discussion. Honestly must start with ourselves.

Honesty must also direct our relationships with those we hold dear in any way. To have a relationship that reaches beyond the superficial requires a trust that allows me to share with another my authentic self. To do so, I must trust in the other’s ability to respect who I am. Such trust invites reciprocity, begets transparency, and yields honest conversations.

This brings us to our relationship with God. 1 John 4:20 says for the one who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. Our ability to be honest with a brother, sister, friend, partner really affects how honest we truly are with God. For the pattern begins with the tangible here, and only an authentic relationship will teach us how to relate with the God we cannot see.

I believe the first step really begins with myself. My ability to see God depends on my own honesty with self. It's as though the looking glass to God is me, and until I clean the mirror, I cannot find the God within. The cleaning solution is honesty, a true sense of myself, an acceptance of the who I really am.

In effect, our journey can only reveal to us what we are first willing to accept.

Contemplative Seeing

We are in a time period of short days becoming shorter, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. Our weather is colder, our nights longer. It is nature providing us with proof of the usefulness of darkness and dormancy, and its power to prepare life even while all seems asleep.


To learn the truth of St. Teresa words: One knows God in oneself, and knows oneself in God often requires us to journey through darkness, a darkness that ultimately reveals. Perhaps we need darkness in our spiritual lives because we cannot bear the whole truth about ourselves in full light.  Perhaps in darkness we learn to look with different eyes, one that looks in rather than out. Perhaps darkness makes us stop to think, instead of rushing headlong into life.

Whatever the reason, we know that darkness is part and parcel of a spiritual life. We know that learning in darkness often illuminates our own sense of ourselves, so that we realize that helplessness, imperfection and our true unflattering selves are not a hindrance to loving God; only their denial is. And in that truth, we find we can leave the world of appearance and walk in the corridor of the inner sanctum. And there, darkness will be greater than light; we will accept our naked self; and powerlessness will not frighten us because we will know God, and in his Light we will see Light itself.