Devotion to Life and the Game of Hide and Seek
The Art of Not Doing and Savoring the Storm
April 19, 2023
dialogue

Devotion to Life and the Game of Hide and Seek

Devoción a la vida y el juego del escondite

A student shares a profound shift in meditation: a lifelong Catholic prayer about unworthiness spontaneously reversed into an experience of total belonging, raising questions about devotion, the lover and the beloved, and a newly discovered love for life.

Devotion to Life and the Game of Hide and Seek

A student shares a profound shift in meditation: a lifelong Catholic prayer about unworthiness spontaneously reversed into an experience of total belonging, raising questions about devotion, the lover and the beloved, and a newly discovered love for life.

What a beautiful meditation. Lately, your meditations move me to a place that feels new. It is new in a sense, yet I feel I have always had it. It is just very present these days.

My question has to do with devotion, or this experience of devotion to beauty that I am having. It brings me to tears all the time. Anytime you talk about the heart, or about allowing everything that is happening, what comes up for me is this experience of devotion to life and to beauty. The beauty of the game of hide and seek is just wonderful. Your words evoke this awe, this wonderment.

Today something interesting happened. I have a Catholic upbringing, and many of the Christian teachings live in the framework of my mind. Certain Catholic phrases and teachings often come to me. There is one I have called up many times. It is part of the church service I attended as a child with my grandmother. I am not a practicing Catholic, but the words stayed with me. In Spanish it says: Señor, no soy digna de que entres en mi casa, pero una palabra tuya bastará para sanarme. It translates to something like: "Lord, I am not worthy of you coming into my home, but just one of your words will be enough to heal me."

I have said that to myself many times when I was suffering. But today, for the first time, it flipped. What I experienced was: I am one hundred percent worthy of you. Not only that, I am your church. I am the walls. I am everyone attending.

All this love, all this beauty, and suddenly it is just so overwhelming. But the question that remains is: who am I, the one who feels this devotion? And to what am I devoted? I know the teachings about this one reality, yet the experience is still one of devotion to something else. I wonder if you have anything to share about what happened today.

The lover and the beloved

I find it beautiful to hear you. I am sure I am not the only one. There would be no non-duality without duality. What beauty there is in this experience of the lover and the beloved. It is something to savor.

That makes sense. Another thing that has been with me lately is how beautiful it is to hide behind the belief, behind the doubt of loving life, when what I truly have is the biggest love for life. Just hiding right behind it.

And the fun of it. It was not that long ago you told me you did not know whether you had love for life.

Hiding behind the absence of love

Exactly. We often talk in non-duality about the fear of death, the fear of ultimate disappearance. I have many fears, and I explore fear, my relationship with it. But death in particular, ultimate disappearance: how do I approach that one?

In the past few days I have been finding that perhaps I was hiding behind the idea that, because of a lack of love for life, there was no fear of death. When in reality, in order to find that fear, I first need to realize that I have this immense love for life. That is the hiding and the seeking, in a way.

It is beautiful. I do not know why I cry so much lately, but I know these are tears of immense beauty.

We can feel it. I can see it in people's faces. Savor it: the joy of being in love with life.