Coming Home to You
This week I’m writing and excavating ideas about what it means to “come home to self, to God, and to others.” More about that in my last post if you want to catch up.
Today let’s talk about what it means to come home to yourself. You may wonder, “Shouldn’t I come home to God first before coming home to self?” I’m not sure it matters how we define where to start as God always knows where we are. Or as perfectly expressed by Augustine, “Grant, Lord, that I may know myself, that I may know Thee.” Knowing self begins with embracing all that life has offered in the unfolding story of life. This may sound over simplistic, but few take time in their journey to stop long enough to take inventory of life, past, present, and future, as an intentional act of listening to what their life is telling them.
The methods, resources, and tools we use to dig into our own story and identity are many — from simple journaling of life experiences through the decades, to meditating on life with the Ignatian Exercises, to working with the Enneagram, and of course, sharing life stories with a spiritual director who can listen and wonder and invite you to find truth and light and the Divine presence in it all. In these ways and others we begin to pay attention to what we bring with us as valuable and life-giving experiences that form and inform the essence of our being. And we pay attention to what we bring along as unnecessary baggage that we can ultimately cast off as ballast,.
Perhaps one of the best examples of the power of coming home to self is the story of two disciples walking home on the road to Emmaus after the devastating experience of seeing Jesus crucified and buried. They are depressed, downcast, troubled as they walk along. So downcast, in fact, that they don’t recognize the resurrected Jesus who joins them on this journey. Before revealing his identity to them, Jesus engages them to tell their story, to express their feelings, to explain all that had happened from their point of view. Only after they embraced all that they had experienced, could they see the Divine presence, and feel their “hearts burning within them” as they came home, (literally and figuratively) to themselves and to God which then ultimately led them to tell their experience to others.
I’d love to hear the ways you come home to yourself — which is an ongoing journey. And how it has made a difference in your ability to know God.
