The place of knowing

‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.’ (John 14:1)

There is nothing so practical, today, so needed and often missing within our hearts and churches, than a clear sense and deep awareness of the presence of Christ within our hearts.

Navigating the daily onslaught of conflict, anger, party spirit and rage that poisons the discourse of our nation requires careful tending of the place of knowing at the center of our souls.

We need an interior place to be, to rest, to return, a reserve of relative quiet and certainty unfazed by the contesting opinions and incessant bursts of ‘Breaking News’ that inundate our consciousness.

Unmoored and untethered to the deep truth of our being, our hearts and minds get swept away in the tsunami of information, opinions and memes pouring from every digital device we own, connecting us to everything under the sun, except ourselves.

But even these, my words, are more noise amid the din. What we need is to descend into the silent soul, there to feel the ache of searching love that is the presence of the Love who is searching for us, eager that we might shut off the noise, stop trying to keep up with everything and listen.

‘We need only to find a place where we can be alone and look upon Him present within us,’ St. Teresa of Avila counsels. Again and again, she encourages us to go within, to ‘represent Christ’ within us, holding and seeing an image of him within and resting there, present to one another in love.

For her, this often meant seeing him in Gethsemane or in his Passion, humbly speaking to him of whatever was on her heart.

For me, often as not, it is walking just behind him in the fields of Galilee or finding my way to the hillside where he sat in silence, watching as the faint light of a day newly born appeared over distant hills, his heart at rest in the Mysterious Love who indwelt his being.

Welcomed into that holy space, the noise of the world falls away, the troubles of yesterday disappear and the Love he is blossoms within, its warmth at once revealing who he is, the One with Whom he communed and the soul I truly am beneath the face I show to the world.

I wish I could live in this interior space always. I wish everything I said and did rose out of this place of knowing. I’d be a much better and kinder person. But all-too-often, the bitter conflicts and noise that roil our society floods my consciousness, and I lose myself, living far from the place of knowing.

And I must start again, just like so many other times, to find my way back to places I have known him and known myself as the place of his abiding, the two of us joined in one love.

The spiritual life is wonderful, Thomas Merton once mused, ‘if you are content to always be a beginner.’ Always starting anew. Knowing then not knowing; having then wanting; finding then losing.

Returning again and again to the place of knowing to hear his voice, ‘Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.’

David L. Miller