false. How good is that? This is why saints like Augustine, Teresa of Avila, and
Carl Jung seem to fully equate the discovery of their own souls with the very
discovery of God. It takes much of our life, much lived experience, to trust and
allow such a process. But when it comes, it will feel like a calm and humble
ability to quietly trust yourself and trust God at the same time. Isn’t that what
we all want?
If you can trust and listen to this inner divine image, this whole-making
instinct, or what I called in an earlier book your “True Self,”*5 you will be
moving forward with your best, your largest, your kindest, your most inclusive
self. (I should also add “your most compassionately dissatisfied self,” because the
soul’s journey invites us to infinite depth that we can never fully plumb!) As
Augustine says, “A temporal thing is loved before we have it, and it grows
worthless when we gain it, for it does not satisfy the soul...but the eternal is
more ardently loved the more it is acquired....The soul will find the eternal
even more valuable after once tasting it.”*6 I am quite sure this is what drove
Etty Hillesum ever deeper and ever forward, and allowed her to follow a very
sensual, even sexual experience in the bedroom with prayers of adoration on the
bathroom floor, all within the same half hour.
Spiritual satisfactions feed on themselves, grow by themselves, create
wholeness, and are finally their own reward. Material satisfactions, while surely
not bad, have a tendency to become addictive, because instead of making you
whole, they repeatedly remind you of how incomplete, needy, and empty you
are. As alcoholics often say, your “addiction makes you need more and more of
what is not working.” Spiritual satisfactions will often be communicated to us in
material, embodied, and ecstatic forms, however. Embodiment is good and
necessary, so don’t dismiss it too quickly as “the flesh.” The difference is in how
we encounter these forms. If we can be satisfied to enjoy them, observe them,
participate in them, they give us ongoing joy. They are fingers pointing at the
moon. But once we try to possess, capture, or “own” the moon, or any material
thing, pulling it inside our own ego control, it is somehow polluted. Social
scientists say that the excitement that surrounds the opening of a physical gift
fades within a very few minutes.
In fact, far from consuming spiritual gifts for yourself alone, you must receive
all words of God tenderly and subtly, so that you can speak them to others
tenderly and with subtlety. I would even say that anything said with too much
bravado, overassurance, or with any need to control or impress another, is never
the voice of God within you. I hope I am not doing that here. If any thought