"Dogma....................................."

”Each society suffers from a we-have-finally-arrived syndrome in which the attitudes, achievements, and opinions held by it are given a colossal significance that towers over what other such bodies say… The desert where prayer flourishes is the desert of our own hearts, barren of all the slogans that we have been led to believe to be our very identity and salvation. We learn that to love Jerusalem is one thing, to prostitute ourselves to it is another.” ….Palace of Nowhere

The author, in this portion of his book, appears to be interweaving the church, as a moral institution, into the subject of contemplation. “In religion,” he states, “it frequently occurs that we give God a name, then equate Him with the name we have given Him; and, in so doing, we make ourselves, in effect, God’s God. Instead of acknowledging Him as the source of our identity, we make ourselves the self-proclaimed source of such identification, making Him the one made in our image and likeness, defining all things and giving shape to the perimeters of life.” When he speaks of running and running “in our squirrel cage, thinking that the constant squeaking of our achievement wheel verifies our reality and worth”, I am reminded how easy it is get “lost”, even in ministry. Indeed, “the crux of the matter” is that we cannot be like God without God; and prayer, in its most sincere form, begins “when it becomes the one thing necessary, when we go to our closet as into a sacred place, realizing that our own heart is the actual location where Jacob’s ladder touches the earth.” The balance then, that state of failing to connect, of finding yourself swimming in His waters, wet but not fully submerged, of maintaining a thirst to know Him even deeper in the fullness of all that He is, is life itself, the breath that keeps us on a daily basis. The Trappist monk and I may, indeed, see a few things from different perspectives, but on this gift we are agreed. It is free unto all who are willing to humble themselves to receive it……