The prophet Isaiah records a powerful and compelling image for the Hebrew people. In it the God of Israel speaks a message that echoes down through the centuries. It brings strength and guidance to many people who follow the Judeo-Christian path.
“When you pass through the waters
I will be with you;
when you walk through fire
you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.”
(Isa. 43:2 RSV)An enduring Presence animates the history and the wandering of those who have been nourished by this Old Testament tradition.
But apply these words of the prophet to your own inner world. There is a remarkable parallel with the unfolding of inner life. The felt sense can be a place of fire and flood, confusion, turbulence, and pain. It is beyond control, beyond the crafted security that ego can provide.
A call into the desert drew the Hebrews from their familiar Egyptian landscape into the untamed wilderness of Sinai. What they lived as an external, historical event we experience today in the unfolding of our own inner sense of self. Focusing* provides an Exodus context for each of us. It places us in the wilderness area of our own open-ended journey, our pilgrimage, our wandering in the realm of evolutionary surprise.
This is a desert place for most of us because we usually come to know ourselves as ego, as the ones who strive for control. Yet here, control must be abandoned in favor of a new way of being.
Two vital experiences happened to the Israelites during their Exodus wandering, two experiences that radically transformed their sense of themselves. They discovered a new identity, and in it they were touched by the saving power of God.
The desert was beyond all control, yet out of this strange wilderness came wonders and surprise. Water gushed forth from a rock. Manna fell from above. They were given a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to guide them.
The Israelites heard a voice that spoke to them in this wilderness, a voice from beyond the habitual, the familiar, the secure. The protective shell of their hardened ego was blistered by the desert sun – cracked, broken, and eventually transformed. Exodus for the Israelites was a time of conversion. Beyond all their resistance a new identity lay waiting to be born. They were to discover themselves as gift, as graced. They would find within the limitations of their own flesh the seed of God.
So, too, with each of us in our time. What Hebrew could imagine the surprise of living water gushing forth from an arid desert rock? Who among us can imagine that the hard place of inner resistance – anger, frustration, fear, and confusion – might one day open up to point the way home?
Do we yet know the gift we are? Have we explored that inner reserve beyond our ego?
Exodus is now. It is the story of Everyman, Everywoman, and Everychild. It is a journey lived over and over again. It is the commitment to a greater depth of humanness. It is finding in life much more than simply the will to survive. It is testing the waters of deeper identity. Being drawn beyond all willing into the embrace of a wider bio-spiritual quest.
– excerpted from “Bio-Spirituality” by Drs. Peter A. Campbell and Edwin M. McMahon, both Jesuit priests, pages 82-85.
*Focusing here refers to Bio-Spiritual Focusing which is a special way of coming home to the truth of yourself by turning your attention inside your body so a gifting energy within the “Larger Body” (of which you are an integral cell) can free you to grow more connected and whole. On the back cover of the book, it is written:
“Beyond ideology, culture, race or religious affiliation, the human body with its wondrous capacity for knowing and being in the universe, for being “in God”, is what ultimately binds every human being into a shared experience of “the Transcendent.”
Bio-Spiritual Focusing is a simple, step-by-step approach into the wisdom of your body – the bridge connecting you with a Sacred Presence greater than yourself.”
Bio-spiritual Focusing aside, I feel that the Exodus story, like all stories in the Word of God, is our story. If the Word is indeed alive, then the lived experiences of those who have gone before us are the stories of today. The people in the Bible experienced fear, doubt, anguish, anger, disappointment, pain, suffering, joy, bliss, delight, miracles, the call of God, and more. The people in the Bible heard the voice of God in their lives and in the wilderness. Today, we experienced these too, and we can only become aware of God’s presence in our day-to-day living when we pay attention.
Don’t just read the Bible. Draw parallels in the stories of the Word to your life, and therein God is actively ministering to you. May you find a new way of being as you allow the Word to engage you.
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