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January 3, The Tenth Way: Perseverance

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Part of the Series The Twelve Days of Christmas as Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Connection with God.

by NateKat Photography

The light of the star is leading you uphill now.  Bethlehem doesn't sit on a plan; it rests on a mountain.  The last stage of your journey is a climb--a sweaty, gasping-for-air ascent toward the light of Christ.

Spiritual enlightenment is not walk in the park.  You've crossed snow-covered mountains, crossed raging rivers, defeated bandits on the road, overcome thirst and hunger and fear, trudged on in the darkness against the howls of your inner demons.  You're thinner now than when you set out.  Older.  You're carrying less.  In pursuit of this great Light, you've left nearly everything you once thought you needed along the winding road behind you.

Your lungs burn with each step upward, but as you pause to catch your breath, you become increasingly aware of another sensation within you--pleasure.  At first this seems strange, for why should such hard work, such risk, such fear and deprivation and loss result now in pleasure?  

Then it dawns on you.  All you thought you needed, you don't need; all you thought you couldn't live without, you can live without; all you once thought mattered most, doesn't matter.  You are free.  You feel lighter than you've ever felt before.  You shudder with a brief and exquisite happiness, true joy.

You own nothing now but faith, and the two gifts that cannot be separated from it--hope and love.  Three treasures available to all but possessed only by those who persevere in this difficult inner journey of prayer, those who traverse their own interior geography though landscapes as beautiful and challenging as anything on Earth.  

The way of prayer is hard; becoming who you are will cost you every lesser thing.  But there's no turning back now.  Grace awaits you just beyond the next rise.  Naked now but for the three priceless gifts you carry, persevere--you're nearly there.   

Today, I will persevere in prayer, focusing my awareness on God beyond all lesser things.  I'll yield all I once thought I could not live without.  I'll breath-in the brief and exquisite happiness of this holy nakedness.  Faith, carry me these last few steps.  Hope, hold me.  Love, fill me.

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January 2, The Ninth Way: Darkness

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Part of the Series The Twelve Days of Christmas as Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Connection with God.

by Schjelderup

On Christmas, a Light broke into the darkness of the world's night, and a star--marking the crossroads between East and West, North and South--stood sentinel above the place of Christ's coming.  You glimpsed this star while far away, and awakened by fresh hope, left everything behind, setting out on the one journey that truly matters:  find the Light, come hell or high water.

The one thing you underestimated was the darkness--it feels like hell and high water.  Out here, between the life you left behind and the Light you seek, it's night.  

Honestly, much of the life of prayer is spent here--in between, in the dark.  Here, you have more questions than answers; you feel more of God's absence than God's presence; you've set out for the Light, but it's only gotten darker; you wonder if this wasn't so wise after all.

But darkness is the one great necessity in the spiritual life.  The saints will all tell you this.  Your ego loves daylight, but night unsettles, even unseats it.  The ego--the little self-manager within you---doesn't know how to function in the dark.  When you can see, your ego knows just what to do.  But in the darkness all your mental faculties are disoriented, and you have only your heart of faith to guide you (Isaiah 50.10-11).  This is why fear is so common in the darkness; your ego feels like it's dying, and it is.  But it must die if you are to live.

True prayer must take you by the dark path.  Only so can you come to the true Light that is true God and not some projection of the ego.  In the darkness you must let go of all but faith--all props and pretension, all assumptions and preconceptions.  This darkness you will tempt you to turn back and return to lesser lights, rather than journey deeper into the darkness that will free you, if you let it.  

But if you press forward, blind to all but the faint light of faith, you will find what you're looking for.

Too long I've feared the darkness.  Today, I will embrace it as grace--a severe but liberating mercy.  I will walk though the darkest valley.  I will be afraid.  May my fear strengthen my faith until faith is all I have.

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January 1, The Eighth Way: Humility

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Part of the Series The Twelve Days of Christmas as Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Connection with God.

by Nina Matthews Photography

You seek God, but the further you go on this journey, the more you keep bumping into yourself.  

Let's say you decide to take a few minutes and enter the quiet of prayer; you descend into your heart and journey further toward the intimacy with God you desire.  But the moment you do, a riot breaks out within you.  Your mind jumps to life and your thoughts leap around inside your brain like a bunch of monkeys on crack.  

You've come face to face with your ego.

The ego is not pride; rather it's the self-managing faculty within you whose job it's been to take care of you all these years.  The ego's not bad; it just thinks it's God.  So when you begin to seek God in earnest, it's not amused.  It doesn't mind you being religious---if you're religious, it's still in charge telling you how to be good, condemning you when you're not, and reminding you of all the rules you ought to keep.

So long as the ego still rules the roost, you'll never really know God.  Your ego can know all about God but that doesn't mean you know God.  What you know of God is simply a surrogate for the real thing.  

To advance in the spiritual life your ego must be humbled, and that's no easy task.  "Humility," someone's said, "is not thinking less of yourself; it's thinking of yourself less."  But that's precisely what the ego can't handle.  When you seek God earnestly, it will holler and scream at you, and will try to distract you with a parade of ugly thoughts, fears, even the most beautiful things in the world.

When it does, don't give up; all this means you're moving in the right direction.  Concentrate on the light you seek.  You're humbling your ego; you're un-selfing yourself.  God awaits behind the idol of your humbled ego.  Humility, then, is the beginning of wisdom.  But know this: it will get darker before it gets lighter; you'll feel more like a fool before you feel wise.  You've entered the narrow gate and the way is hard (Matthew 7.13-14).  Only a few walk this way.  

Today, rather than just letting my thoughts rule the roost, I'll take a few moments and watch them without following where they want to take me.  That ought to infuriate my ego . . . in a good way.

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December 31, The Seventh Way: Words

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by Ian Ozsvald

Part of the Series The Twelve Days as Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Connection with God.

You will, of course, want to pray along the way--that is, you'll find yourself wanting to speak words to God and about God.  Prayer, you think, is about words, and yes, you're right.  It is about words, there's no escaping that.  But prayer is so much more than words.

In truth, you've been praying all along--from before you awakened to your deep desire or desperation to follow this start to the End.  Prayer is not merely asking God for things.  It's not just using nice words to massage the Divine.  It may include these things, but prayer is essentially your awareness of God, your presence to the Presence.  It's not merely the mind or mouth in motion.  Prayer is an awakened heart, an interior awareness of God.  This is why the Bible often shows how the mind and mouth are made dumb--stone silent--when God shows up (Habakkuk 2.20 and Mark 9.7 are just two of many examples).

The problem with words is that we tend to become hypnotized by them.  First, we form them and then they form us.  We think that once we've attached a label to something we know what it is.  But consonants and vowels can't fully explain a flower, let alone its Maker.  I think that's why God played coy with Moses and gave him a riddle for the Divine Name rather than a label.  "I'm not going to give you a label by which you can think you've got Me figured out," said God.  "Just call me 'I Am Who I Am," (Exodus 3.14).  God wasn't going to let Moses or anyone else think that because he could utter a few sacred words, he had God figured out, tamed, or employed in some great cause.  God's too big for that.

Of course, you must use words with God, and words have a beauty of their own.   But the trick is not to be tricked by them.  You must not misuse them or attach too much too them or over-identify with the words themselves.  If you do, you'll be liable to reduce prayer to mere words and miss the Word Itself.  

So, when you speak to God or about God, don't babble or drone on and on (Matthew 6.7).  Instead, take up a Psalm or little twig of Scripture and lay it on the fire of your growing love for God.  Let those simple words guide your words, and improvise on them if you wish.  "But take care," says God, "and don't get too attached to words; their only aim is to light the way to Me." 

Today, I'll not heap up empty phrases.  Instead, I'll light a small fire on the hearth of my heart.  A few sacred words are all I'll need for kindling.

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December 30, The Sixth Way: Desert

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by Moyan_Brenn

Part of the Series The Twelve Days as Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Connection with God.

You're walking now.  It's night.  Away from the city lights you're more able to perceive the haunting beauty of the landscape around you.  As you do, two things begin to happen to you.

First, with each step you take farther on and deeper in, you sense a growing anticipation rising within you.  In your heart, there's a growing conviction that you've finally set out on the one journey that truly matters; you're pursuing the Ultimate, the Absolute, the Source and Goal of all life.  All you were made for and destined to be lies at the end of this journey, bathed in the pure radiance of the star's bright light.

Second, you notice you've begun to enter a new and strange land you've never seen before, never even known existed.  The familiar landmarks are gone.  You've moved off the map.  You're lost to all except the light of the star.  Anticipation emboldens you, but the strangeness of this new land unnerves you.

If you've not know something of this eagerness and nervousness, you've not gone far enough on the spiritual journey; your praying's been too safe.  At some point, all who seek God must find themselves carried into some kind of desert experience, for the desert is the furnace of transformation.  In the desert, we're stripped of all we've carried but do not need.  In the desert, we're stripped down, relieved of burdens and attachments, until the only thing remaining is the nakedness of the heart's pure trust in God.  All we've valued, all we've used to justify ourselves, prove ourselves, make ourselves worthy and lovable and useful is irrelevant here.  All we thought we needed to survive, we don't need.  Only one thing is needed, and That can never be taken from us. 

This is the very reason why every spiritual "athlete" from Abraham to Mother Theresa was pressed by the Holy Spirit into the desert.  Welcome.  You've now joined them.

Today, I'll acknowledge that the desert frightens me and I don't easily surrender all I've accumulated up to this point.  But I know I must not avoid the desert and its healing, liberating power of I'm to find what I'm looking for.