Held before Holding

Imagine a child who is at the beach for the very first time. Having grown up in the mid-west, this is easy to picture. Because I wasn't accustomed to seeing the ocean. I only saw it when we took a vacation to the coast. I never took it for granted.

Now, imagine the child running to the edge of the water, a pail flailing in her little hand. She bends over as the water rushes in on the beach, scoops up as much water as she can handle, and marches back with an announcement: "I've got the ocean!"

And she does. In a sense. Even as the pail sloshes, and in a matter of minutes, she pours it out again.

Meanwhile, the actual ocean is still there, uncontained. It stretches beyond what our eyes can see. And the thought arrives, there's no pail that could ever, possibly contain it.

The pail episode nearly forgotten—by the child, who was playing as she always does, though not her father—now her father takes her by the hand and leads her into the surf. The waves come, washing over her feet. They go in a little deeper. He doesn't remove his hand from her, guiding her, as the subtle undercurrent lifts her off her feet. Now she is laughing. Even as she cannot hold the ocean, but the ocean holds her.

But when we come to God, are we coming with a pail? Or are we stepping into the ocean? Most of us approach our spirituality like the girl with the pail.

St. Teresa of Ávila did too.

In one of her Spiritual Testimonies, she describes trying to understand the mystery of the Trinity with her mind, laboring to grasp how three Persons could be one God. Sound familiar? I think every Christian has gone through this mental exercise from time to time.

She was not being careless or proud; she wanted to know the One she loved. But the effort left her straining. Then, she heard the Lord speak to her: “Don’t try to hold Me within yourself, but try to hold yourself within Me” (Spiritual Testimonies 14, June 30, 1571).

The little exhortation was not a command to stop thinking. It wasn't a rebuke against the intellect. He wasn't telling her that what she was pondering didn't matter, or wasn't important. He didn't say she should just settle for her ignorance.

Rather, he reversed the direction of her exercise. He reoriented her posture toward the Mystery.

She had been trying to make God fit inside her finite, pail-sized, intellect and understanding. He did not tell her she must expand her mind. No matter how much she did, no pail-sized mind could ever hold the ocean of God's mystery. So, instead, he told her to embrace her smallness. To be content to be small, and thus, enveloped in Him.

This isn't an isolated episode in the life of a saint. It's something that we see, time and again, across Scripture.

When Solomon dedicated the temple, which may be the most magnificent structure ever built by human beings, particularly given his time, he stood before it, examining what he'd spent so much time laboring to build and recognized: "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built" (1 Kings 8:27).

Solomon built a house for God. It wasn't a spur of the moment kind of thing. God had told his father, David, that he'd be the one to build it. Years of planning, more care and concern for every detail than you can imagine. And when it was done... he had one confession: God can't be contained, even here.

That's because the temple was never supposed to be a container. It was a meeting place.

The intellect is a kind of temple too, and it can be quite magnificent. It should be valued, and nurtured. I've met a few glorious intellects. I've read even more. People whose minds, in comparison to mine, make me feel like a Kindergartner. God made these minds. He gave them the gift. He delights in them.

But I think we've also known some brilliant minds who were too impressed with themselves. Who thought they were truly masters of Divinity, and had the degree to prove it.

St. Teresa saw this, too. As you read her writings, she reflects constantly that intellectual men are often graced with a magnificent capacity to be spiritual men. Their gifts often allow them to recollect themselves to God's presence quite easily, as so many subjects in which their minds might enter, are already there, as if all their study had been but preparation to enter more fully into God's presence.

But St. Teresa was quite adamant that the intellect and the will must together surrender to God, and she lamented many great intellects who did far more damage than good, who became puffed up, and trapped in pride and vainglory.

The mind that boasts of its own magnificence, as many people did who lost sight of Solomon's initial observation (as Solomon did, himself some time later) is like trying to contain God in a temple, or like a child trying to swoop up the entire ocean into a pail.

St. Augustine once preached: Si comprehendis, non est Deus, “If you comprehend it, it is not God” (Sermon 52.16).

That is not an insult to reason. St. Augustine was also a champion of reason, and cherished his intellect. He also know its limits. His statement is about proportion. A finite mind cannot wrap itself around an infinite God any more than a pail can hold the entire Pacific.

That doesn't mean it's wrong to dip the pail in, to examine what little bit of it the pail can hold. It does mean, though, that it's silly to imagine what that little pail contains is the whole of it.

Scripture, rather, encourages the opposite movement.

Preaching in Athens, St. Paul told the philosophers that God is not far from any of us, "For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’" (Acts 17:28).

This is one of Paul's favorite little prepositional phrases. He uses it a lot. The Greek phrase is en autō, “in Him.”

His letters return again and again to life “in Christ,” en Christō.

He is not describing a place we go to, or a prime sightseeing location on vacation. He's talking about entering into, inhabiting Christ. The fish does not contain the whole ocean, but it lives within it.

Paul wrote likewise to the Colossians, "for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3).

Your life is not a vessel that somehow imprisons Christ, or contains him as an object you can master or control. Your life is hidden inside Him, wedded to His life with the Father.

The psalmist knew this long before Paul. "Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations" (Psalm 90:1). The Hebrew word used here is ma’on, a refuge, a den, a habitation.

Yes, it is true, God does dwell within us. The fish draws the ocean into its lungs, too. The child really has ocean in her pail. But this, it seems, is not merely a "container" but a meeting place. Much like, when you go to a place, you draw in its air, but your lungs do not hold the entire place. It's really there, in you, but it's still bigger than you. There's no vacuum sealed lid over your heart, or your soul, that keeps it inside, like the "little Gospel light" hidden under a bushel.

We are not given Tupperware hearts. We are given hearts like channels, finite, so immediately overflowed and filled by infinite Love, that in the very act of receiving Him, we are drawn into Him. Not to cling to Him, or grasp Him, or think we've got Him all figured out. But to rest, to reside.

He is our dwelling place. He is within us only because we are within Him. Try to step aside, to hold onto what you've given, and move away from the source, well, you'll have nothing but a pail and in your clumsy hands, it's likely to slosh out in short order.

Jesus Himself, on the night before He died, gave us a similar image that really pulls all of this together: "Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me" (John 15:4).

There is a mutuality here, of course! He does abide in us. But the order matters. The branch does not contain the vine. The vine feeds the branch, supports it, and gives it a place to grow. Cut off the branch, thinking it has gotten it's portion, it will be a dead stick in short order. A branch content to remain inside the vine bears fruit by simply remaining connected. We sometimes call this cooperating with grace. It's not so much a product of our sheer effort as it is about abiding, cooperating, remaining in the source.

When we take this seriously, it can revolutionize our spiritual lives.

Our prayers change. Many of us pray the way Teresa was praying that day: straining to produce the right thoughts, the right feelings, a perfect mastery of doctrine, a fine apologetic, a clear enough picture of God to feel we have “got” Him. The water in the pail is still ocean water. These things are not wrong, in and of themselves. Our posture toward such things might be, and can easily be, severely limited. So, in this kind of grasping, we struggle in prayer, too. We cannot meditate, we do not find an image that goes very deep, and we give up prayer as many times as we begin, assuming we've failed.

But if prayer is less about grasping and more about being held, then the quiet, wordless moments when the mind runs out are not failures. They may be the moment the waves lift our feet from the sand. And then, we find that we never run out of meditations in prayer. We do not seek to "grasp" our momentary consolations, but we find more consolation in remaining with Him, even in a dark night (when the feelings are gone), even in the darkest abyss of the sea. We would gladly go to His Cross, and endure His passion, not because we "get it," but because it "gets us," it envelops us, it leads us into His heart. St. Augustine described God as “more inward than my inmost self and higher than my highest” (Confessions 3.6.11). You cannot capture that. You can only consent to it.

Suffering changes too. When life dismantles our explanations and we cannot fit what is happening into any framework that makes sense, the temptation is to think God has slipped out of our hands. What St. Teresa shares with us suggests we had Him in our hands the wrong way to begin with. Paul, after wrestling for eleven chapters a number of such difficult questions, finally tossed aside the pail and sang in jubilant praise: "O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" (Romans 11:33).

That is not despair. It is a man who saw his pail overflowing. Who recognized He could not contain it. And found himself, rather, enveloped by the ocean itself.

Here are some ways we can apply this truth to our daily lives.

Begin prayer with placement rather than production. Spiritual masters call this process recollection. We re-collect ourselves before God, entering His presence. This is not quite the same as asking Him to be present near us, it's more intimate than that. It's not gazing at the ocean from the shore, but wading in. So, before you launch into a laundry list of petitions, or call to mind a matter of meditation in prayer, take a slow breath. Recognize His presence, His overwhelming presence, and allow yourself to be enveloped, totally overwhelmed.

When your mind cannot understand something about God, when you struggle in the intellect, do not let that be a cause to despair, but rejoice. Some of our minds can hold onto more or less than others, and that's fine. Because even the most brilliant mind is finite, and is infinitely smaller than God's infinite Presence.

He may give you more understanding, or He may not. If you desire to understand more, though, the answer isn't necessarily more books, as helpful as books can be. Often, it's about being a child, climbing into her father's lap, and out of love, asking the father questions. Not because the child things she can "master" her father, but because she's held, because in love she desires to know more.

I once met a brilliant civil war scholar. He knew more about Abraham Lincoln than, perhaps, anyone on earth. When I expressed, "wow, it's almost like you know Lincoln," he just laughed. "I'll never know him better than Mary Todd." His point. Presence and relationship, entering into a relationship, is always infinitely more than what we can grasp through study alone.

Several times a day, practice this recollection. Sometimes it will serve to go deeper into prayer, but at other times, it will simply put the life you're living into perspective.

I recently adapted a practice I learned from St. Gemma Galgani. In her Diary she wrote how she'd made a rule for herself to pray, "My Jesus, Mercy" every time the clock tolled. Well, our clocks don't really toll any more. So, I set an alarm on my phone for each hour of the day (on vibrate only). Each time it goes off, I say that little prayer. It takes a second, maybe two. I do not just speak the words, or think them, but intentionally recollect myself to His presence. Think of it like wading back into the ocean, letting the undertow sweep my feet away.

It changes every minute that follows over the course of the next hour. It really doesn't matter where I'm at or what tasks I'm doing. Cleaning the bathroom, doing the dishes, writing one of my novels, dealing with screaming children. Recall Paul’s three words: in Him we live. Practice recollection. I like St. Gemma's practice because it's scheduled, it's not something I have to come to in my thoughts. It interrupts my thoughts. Some holy men and women do not require such reminders. I'm not yet at that degree of sanctity, so I figure, if the practice benefitted a saint, well, who am I to think I can maintain such a practice on my whims alone? Such 'whims' are too infrequent, so in my weakness, I am quite eager for such reminders.

With such recollection, we are not "carrying" God around with us, like a little trinket in our pockets. We're moving through life in Him.

And at night, before going to bed, practice an examen. Look across your day. Resist the urge to focus too much on whether you "held on" to God in every moment, or to fixate on your shortcomings. Ask, rather, if you truly allowed Him to hold you. 

The child on the beach eventually drops the pail. It was an honest, innocent, and even cute gesture. But a few more pails full wouldn't have satisfied. It would have grown wearisome, in fact. She let her father lead her into the ocean. So, enter. Let the current sweep your feet out from under you. He's got you.