If we have been involved in charismatic prayer for some time, we should not be surprised or disappointed if this style of prayer calms down over the years to a simple resting in the presence of God. The traditional role of God the Holy Spirit is to conform us to God the Word, Who then ushers us into the silent depths of God the Father. This Trinitarian simplification happens at God’s own initiative.
In early centuries before the Arian controversy that questioned both the divinity of Christ and that of the Holy Spirit, we praised the Trinitarian Mystery not with “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit” but “Glory to the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit.” The Trinitarian dynamism was more obvious in ancient Christian doxologies.
The Holy Spirit’s important role is one of simplification, silencing, and conforming us to Jesus the Word Incarnate, Who then leads us into the depths of the Father. This does not happen sequentially but is a threefold dynamism. Whether through the book of nature, the book of Scripture, or the living tradition that binds us all together, the Holy Spirit will one day touch our tongues and bring us to silence before the Unfathomable.
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
Falling in Love
Some have called the principle of going down in order to go up a “spirituality of imperfection” or “the way of the wound.” St. Paul taught this unwelcome message with his enigmatic statement, “It is when I am weak that I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). Of course, in saying that, he was merely building on what he called the “folly” of the crucifixion of Jesus–a tragic and absurd dying that became resurrection itself.
The transition from the first half of life to the second half of life is itself a “falling upward.” Contrary to the idea of climbing a ladder of perfection, the way up is the way down. It is not by our own willpower or moral perfection that we ascend to higher levels of consciousness. This is completely counterintuitive! Moreover, we can’t engineer enlightenment by ourselves. It is done unto us.
You will not know for sure that this message is true until you are on the “up” side. You will never imagine it to be true until you have gone “down” and come out on the other side in larger form. You must be pressured “from on high,” by fate, circumstance, love, or God, because nothing in you wants to walk the path of descent. Falling upward is a “secret” of the soul, known not by thinking about it or proving it but only by risking it–at least once. Those who have allowed it know it is true, but only after the fact.
This is probably why Jesus praised faith and trust even more than love. It takes a foundational trust to fall or to fail–and not to fall apart. Faith alone holds you while you stand waiting and hoping and trusting. Then, and only then, will deeper love happen. It’s no surprise at all that in English (and, I am told, in other languages as well) we speak of “falling” in love. I think falling is the only way to get to authentic love. None would go freely, if we knew ahead of time what love is going to ask of us. Very human faith lays the necessary foundation for the ongoing discovery of love. Have no doubt, though: great love is always a discovery, a revelation, a wonderful surprise, a falling into “something” much bigger and deeper that is literally beyond us and larger than us.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality of the Two Halves of Life (Jossey-Bass: 2011), xxiv, xxvi-xxvii.
