Intimacy with God

I've been thinking some more about the topic of my post yesterday, "Lean into the Difficulty."  Something has been gnawing at me, and I think I've put my finger on it.

First, I continue to believe that it is enormously important how we choose to deal with the inevitable frustrations that arise in our lives.   I also continue to believe that the practice of moving towards those difficulties -- rather than trying to run away or hide from them -- is a good move to make.  We can "move towards our frustrations" in a variety of ways, including "breathing in" our frustration, and then "breathing it out" in a spirit of release and letting go.

But something was gnawing at me about the practice, and I think it's this:  Even this practice of moving towards our difficulties can become driven by our overriding desire to make our troubles GO AWAY.  That is, we may engage in this practice -- not because we want to be more present, or because we want to engage the difficulties of our lives with courage -- but because we want our problems to go away, and we think this may be a technique to make that happen.

If that's the case, then our primary mission will continue to be: "MAKE THE PAIN GO AWAY."  Not "love your neighbor" or "live for God," but "Make the pain go away."  We will be acting on the belief that "I can only be happy when my problems go away."  Happiness and joy then become this very tenuous enterprise, in which our happiness is controlled by things outside of us, over which we have very little control.  We put ourselves at the mercy of things that are outside of us, and it will be very hard for us to live in joy.  

 It is one thing to apply our energies to resolve problems.  It is an entirely different thing to expect and need our lives to be problem-free.  When we expect our lives to be free of problems, we set ourselves up for a lot of suffering.

This realization struck me as I was reading Father Thomas Keating's book, Divine Therapy and Addiction (for more on Fr. Keating and his magnificent work, click here or here), where he writes, "true happiness is ... intimacy with God."  If Fr. Keating is right, then true happiness does not consist in achieving a problem-free life ... or in achieving absolute safety and security ... or in getting approval from everyone you meet ... or in making everything go your way.  True happiness comes from an intimate relationship with God, the Ultimate Reality of the universe.

When we cultivate such a relationship, we can experience happiness and deep contentment, even when things are not going our way.  I think this is the deepest meaning of the word "freedom."  Then, we can move towards our difficulties, not because  it is a technique that can help us get rid of our problems, but because we want to be fully present in our lives, rather than running from our lives.

The question, then, is not, "How can I get rid of each of my problems?"  The question is, "How can I cultivate an intimate life with God in the midst of my daily life?"  That strikes me as a much better question...