On Inner Work and becoming Transparent to God (Reprise with Introduction)

I got repeated questions this week on the inner work I speak of so I decided to put the following piece from not quite a year ago up again. Behind it is the approach to growth work known as PRH (Personality and human relationships). What is essential to PRH is the recognition that human beings are wounded in relationship, and heal and grow in the same way. While it may sound strange to hear a hermit participating in such inner or growth work given this focus, much less depending on it as a key to growing in the silence of solitude, eremitical hiddenness, etc., I assure you it is not! For more on this inner or growth work I speak of, please see other posts with the same labels as this post.  Anyway, on to the post:

Sister, when you write about stricter separation from the world does the inner work you have been doing have a place in it? As I read your last post entitled, "Why isn't it enough?" I thought I got, just for a moment, a glimpse of why that would be important not only so you could live as a hermit, but also as an integral part of the eremitical life. This glimpse came and went in a flash so I can't say more about what I mean but maybe you know just what I am trying to say here. I know you have been criticized by readers in the past for needing to do such work and that you wrote it was integral to your vocation. I think re-reading your last post helped me understand this a little better because I saw you, and myself, and everyone else as having been distorted by the world and needing to do the inner work you speak of to become more clearly ourselves. That was the glimpse I got while reading what you were saying. I don't know if this is something you could write about, but my question is do I have this right? Does the inner work you speak of allow you to become "transparent to God" (your phrase) as you become more truly yourself?

Thanks for your questions. Yes, I definitely think you got it!!! The post you referred to re criticism of my own engagement in what I call "inner work" is found here: On Justifying Inner Work and it contains other links to related articles. It was also prompted by my discovery that the inner work I had been doing for a couple of years at that point might have shown me I had made a mistake in my discernment of an eremitical vocation; instead, it affirmed this vocation again and again. And regarding your second question, YES!!! Absolutely, the inner work is part of what allows me to become transparent to God as I become more truly myself. This transparency to God is the very nature of what it means to be truly human, so the more truly human I become, the more transparent to God. 

We speak about this phenomenon of transparency in a number of ways. The main ones affirm us as imago dei, and incarnations of the Word of God -- especially to the extent we live in light of and through Christ!! I believe the story of Jesus' Transfiguration is a story of his (eventually!!) perceived transparency to God by the chosen disciples. Recently Sister Susan gave me a mirror medallion developed by Richard Rohr. I believe that this too reflected (no pun intended) the notion of becoming transparent to God. It also reminds us that others are, to varying degrees, also transparent to God. The side of the mirror medallion facing one's own heart/self has a symbol of the Trinity on it; it represents the gaze of God and the way God sees us at every moment; the side facing outward is a plain mirror reflecting everything as it is without distortion or judgment. Rohr had experienced the Trinity as a dynamic reality moving through him --- in and out. This experience developed into a practice of receiving beauty and breathing it back out to others. I recognize it as a symbol of transparency to God and to being the imago dei to others, one who sees as God sees and also one who is seen as God sees.

Transparency is something that happens, something we become as more and more we become persons who allow the presence of God to be mediated through and in us. Transparency is a means of revelation, but also of standing truly and honestly as our deepest selves. God seeks to reveal Godself at every moment and mood of our lives and in many ways, we occlude or distort that revelation. Part of all of that "occlusion" comes from our own woundedness and the resulting fear of allowing God (and sometimes, anyone at all) to love us and fill us with God's life and light. Sometimes we have lost so much in trying to be open and trust or love that we cling tightly to the superficial image of who we truly are, even when that "self" is but an echo of who we once were and a shadow of who we are truly called to be. Letting go to allow something so marked by newness, dynamism (change!!), and Mystery, is simply terrifying. And so, when people look at us, they mainly see echoes and shadows, scars, woundedness, and diminishment because that is all we feel free enough to allow ourselves to reveal.

Pope Francis Says Vespers with the
Camaldolese Nuns and Monks in Rome

Sometimes our failure to allow the transparency and revelation God yearns for with each of us comes from other forms of rigidity and arrogance. We believe we know who God is because we were taught about who God is in religion or theology classes. We take refuge in formulae and rituals which at least as easily distance us from the real God as they draw us closer. We have learned these things, sometimes with great effort, and we feel safe with them where the "living God" is more Mysterious and awesome (terrifying) even while he is also intriguing to us (mysterium tremendum et fascinans); they are therefore hard to let go of and can occlude the revelation of the living God we are meant to become. It is the "inner work" I have written about several times now that allows the necessary healing and strengthening of ourselves so that we can live from our deepest potential and love as we are meant to love.

Because God is the source of the potential I am speaking of, and we are the persons who are created as we listen to and respond to that source, we are never ourselves alone (except to the extent we are sinners or impaired by the sin that has touched us) because God is a constituent dimension of who we are. The more truly ourselves we become, the more clearly and truly present God becomes within us. We become more and more transparent to the God who is, as Tillich put the matter, the ground and source of our being. God is not alien to us, nor is God some sort of weird or supernatural parasite within us. When we speak of God dwelling within us, we are speaking of something that is most deeply and truly an essential or fundamental part of ourselves. We cannot be "us" (or even alive at all) without this presence and the opposite is also true: the more we become our truest selves, the clearer and stronger this presence within us becomes. We are truly ourselves, truly holy and truly human when people look at us and see God in everything we are and do. This is what revelation is about and it is what transparency is about. 

The inner work I and others do and that I write about here, allows this to be realized in our lives and all we touch!! It allows us to be healed of all of those forms of woundedness that cripple or otherwise limit us and it opens us to the deepest potential that is ours so that we can live from that for the sake of others. Once I thought of this work as something I could do and finish with so that I could live my vocation as I am called to do. Now I understand that this inner work is part of the "asceticism" or even "penance" that necessarily accompanies my prayer and is essential to my vocation. In other words, I will not finish it -- though I will move through different stages of this work at various times throughout my life; instead, I will continue doing it as a foundational practice because in conjunction with prayer, as you say, it is essential to my vocation and does indeed allow me to become transparent to God ---  which is the essence of eremitical hiddenness, and the goal of my call to holiness and creation as imago dei.

Measuring Growth in Eremitical Life

[[Hi Sister Laurel, I wondered how you measure growth in eremitical life. Do you look for prayer experiences or "stages" in prayer? When I look at how I am growing, I look at relationships and my capacity to love, but how does that work if one is a hermit? You probably see what I am getting at. I know you are a scholar but I don't get the sense that you measure personal growth in terms of scholarship or canonical standing or other externals, so how do you measure growth in your own life or in the life of others you work with?]]

Wow, good questions! Challenging too, because they are questions that we all think we know the answer to until we try to put that answer into words! At that point, we are apt to find we have never asked ourselves the question so directly and never really listened to the answer we have been trying to discover and live. So, let me say initially there are two ways to read your initial question. The first means [[How do I recognize I am growing as a hermit?]] The second is, [[How do I recognize I am growing as a person?]]. Ideally, if one is called to be a hermit, the answers to each will overlap, be similar, and even identical, because growth in one's vocation will mean growing as a human being and growing as a human being will mean growing as God calls one to grow. Still, it is possible for someone to grow into a version of a hermit they hold as normative and be warped as a human being. This is one of the reasons it is so critical to honestly discern what vocation it is to which God calls us. But, back to [[how do I measure growth in eremitical life]] --- and I am going to try to answer both ways of reading that initial question!

In measuring my growth as a hermit there are externals that help me mark progress in my vocation and I do pay attention to those. The most central one is how faithful am I to prayer? No matter what I am doing, how I am feeling, whether I am sick or upset, feeling terrific, in pain, or whatever is going on, I am called to be a person of assiduous prayer. In fact, the NT counsel in this (and for more than hermits!) is to "pray always". This is the goal of God creating each and all of us, and the place where growth as a hermit and growth as a human being coincide. It is not enough to pray a lot, especially if by saying we pray a lot we mean saying a lot of prayers. Here we move from the externals of the life to a deeper, inner place --- and yet, the externals remain important. 

What this counsel to pray always calls for instead, is that we allow ourselves to be transformed into persons in whom God is able to breathe, speak, and sing himself at every moment and mood of our life. Yes, this begins with persistence in regular prayer and it may involve what have sometimes been defined as "stages" of prayer (though really, in some senses one moves backward and forward through these various ways of praying as the exigencies of life demand, and does not so much approach them as a kind of ladder to be climbed). Thus, I think growth in prayer means growth in allowing myself to be loved by God and too, in allowing God to love through me, to relate appropriately to the world he has made his own dwelling place. This always begins and ends by letting God be God. I think that love of God must be defined in these terms before anything else. Love of others will similarly mean allowing (accepting, guiding, nurturing, empowering) them as/to be the persons God calls them to be.

The ways I open myself (in response) to God's love (and thus, let God be God) are numerous and all are important in becoming faithful to prayer in the way I am speaking of prayer here. (This is true even when these things don't seem particularly "spiritual" to us. Remember that prayer is always God's own work within us, God's own being Godself within us.) Prayer periods, silence, study, lectio divina (Scripture and other spiritual reading), journaling, work with my director, recreation like playing music or coloring, walks, regularity in sleep and waking (a real difficulty for me sometimes), liturgical prayer and time with others, teaching Scripture, doing spiritual direction, and serious friendships --- all of these and more are part of being faithful to prayer. While some of these are more critical than others on an everyday basis (i.e., they will shape my day, day in and day out), all of them open me to God's presence so that (he) may work within and through me. So, a piece of measuring my own growth has to include an assessment of how carefully (full of care) I approach all of these. 

Bro Mickey McGrath osfs**

When I was studying theology formally my major professor used to characterize the fruit of the Gospel as making a person capable of [[living in joy and dying in peace]]! I think that in many ways that is the way I measure growth in eremitical life as well. Usually, however, I speak about it as "the silence of solitude" --- a constitutive element defining canon 603 life which I identify as the vocation's charism. For me, this term points to personal healing, to the stillness of shalom, and to the joy-filled wholeness of the individual person who stands in constant dialogue with the God of Love who always wills to be Emmanuel -- God-With-Us. As I have written several times recently, I believe that Emmanuel defines not just God's deepest will for Godself, but for us too and that means being a Self-With-God God is what it means to be truly human. That will be our joy in life and our peace in death. That will be our truest identity. It shouldn't be a surprise then, that the prayer of union is the highest form of contemplative prayer, or that I identify "praying always" as the primary goal of growth as a human being and as a hermit.

In persons I work with, I use the same criteria really --- though, because most of these persons are not hermits, I recognize that the source of authentic joy and peace that is God, will be mediated to and through them differently than it is for me or for other hermits. Still, the signs of growth will be the same. Are they more whole? More truly alive? Are their relationships better and more loving? (This is certainly true for hermits too, by the way!!) Is their work fulfilling and a source of creativity and fruitfulness for themselves and others? Do they live with greater intensity, integrity, and intelligence, and, in the whole of their lives, are they more attentive and responsible? In other words, are they more truly human and moved by the will/love of God? Do they live in joy and can they die in peace (that is, even when things are difficult, are they deeply happy and fulfilled) because in either case, in and with God they are truly being themselves? 

Regarding prayer stages, I look for these mainly to assess what, if anything, needs to change in the way I am directing or accompanying the person. Regarding canonical standing, I do try to ascertain whether someone is ready to make the kind of commitment canonical standing presupposes and calls for, that kind of commitment requires evidence of all of the other things first of all. Jesus came that we might have life and have it abundantly. The commitments we make and recommend others to be allowed to make should, it seems to me, be marked by a clear path towards more truly-abundant life. If the commitment is a public one, then that life is, and is always meant to be, at the service of others in an explicit way. Both the one making the commitment and those helping to discern such a call must be aware of the way God is at work in the person to create life.

I've ranged all over the place in this answer. As I said, it was/is a challenging set of questions. Please feel free to ask anything I was unclear on again, or for whatever clarifications you think might help. Meanwhile, I will think about what I have said here and see if I can get greater clarity and order in my response. If I can, I will follow up with further posts on the same topic.

** I chose Bro Mickey's photo above because he is simply one of the most joyful folks I know.  His joy is not superficial or lacking in seriousness; it does not lack shadows that also reveal the presence of light. It is deep and real and especially spills out in his art. Those of you who are also friends or acquaintances will recognize the appropriateness of the picture to the text!