I am ready for Love...

I’m at the stage where commitment sounds more promising than dating; settling down has shed its stigma; partnership is what I long for.

Every couple months, I travel down to San Francisco for a 5-day session on spirituality. It is a total of eight sessions that span the bulk of two years, complete with a different book list and new faculty each session.

In this time away from home, I am surrounded by faces, accents and tshirts (clergy folk don’t have a ton of variety in their wardrobe when it comes to retreat settings) that become more and more familiar with each new session. Slowly, I am able to recall individual histories and ministry contexts with only a word or phrase as my prompt.

The personal enrichment though, aside from learning another’s story, is that in this process, my own story is taking shape. The deep desires of my soul begin to surface with increased prayer and intentional conversation. My likes and dislikes take a backseat to what the Spirit is working out. It is super slow work (slow by my instant-text-message standard) but I trust in it.

In discovering other folks’ spirituality, I’m beginning to see where my soul is fed, when I am most responsive to God’s “love energies.” Reading the Abbas and Ammas of the desert, Evelyn Underhill, and other deeply spiritual people have begun to chip away at the concrete casing around my heart and imagination called ‘reality’.

Joan Chittister says, “We do not realize that coming to know God has as much to do with coming to know ourselves as it does to anything we know about God. We do not recognize that it is what we are that will determine the nature of the relationship between God and ourselves. And for that to happen, readiness is the key.”

So for a while, I've felt ready -- in every body-aching expression of India's phrases -- ready for love.

But therein lies my problem. I was ready for love without fully experiencing "Love". The capital L explains it all. As much as I think "I'm ready", I know I'm too easily resentful, too easily doubtful, too easily swayed - am I the loving vessel that seeks to know love and Love?

Not yet...and yet, in my core, I believe I am enough.

So, I've turned another corner on this journey and am trying to get back to the basics of prayer and reading scripture; that I might become prayerful -- the consciousness that says, "God is near at all times, God is always available, and "if I ask and I listen and I reach out and I fill my heart with the words of the One who is the Word, then I will be answered."

This is what I'm really ready for...