Unify Your Life: Wednesday Wisdom

How can surrendering allow us to see and experience our lives in a more integrated way?

Thomas Merton wrote: If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. (from Thoughts in Solitude, XII)

The above statement strikes me deeply right now. I have been working so hard at “putting the pieces” together lately, with the start of a new school year, changing my work locations, and adjusting to a new schedule, that I’m now seeking some integration. I pause and ask myself: how to unify my life?  

After any profound experience of change and transition, we are asked to rebalance and reintegrate our lives. I think that by claiming my life, the one I am living every day, as spiritual, then all the pieces can be integrated into a Greater Whole.

We commit and recommit our lives to being all spiritual. Can we allow our lives to be embraced by compassion and love–in the Ultimate and Oneness–and create an integration that is not just circumstantial.

Surrendering is a journey always leading us to integration, where we can return home, to God, inviting us to lean into compassion and love.

Can we move in the direction of integration? Can we call our daily lives, our spiritual lives?

God you are the Center of my life, and in You all is unified and held. 

Practice:

• Look with eyes of compassion: on yourself and others.
• Listen with ears of compassion: to yourself and others.
• Pray into the heart of compassion and find peace there.