Standing on Holy Ground

Everywhere I stand is Holy Ground. If only I could remember that, be truly conscious of it all the time, life would be a breeze. A sense of holiness does come to me in flashes. Yet too much of the time holiness seems to reside somewhere else. To view God as infinite, ever-present and omnipresent, by definition He must be everywhere always, including where I stand. Naturally, this includes not just a patch of physical geography, but also the territory inside the heart. And while I believe this conceptually, so much of the time it is not what I operate from.

Most of my life the ego has controlled my head, and therefore, my living, with the heart’s terrain relegated to a backup position. You know, like when you’re in trouble? How difficult it remains to consciously invoke that which created me and sustains me with real surrender. Instead, I plod along relying on that increasingly unreliable source: the ego. And while it has served me in helpful ways, it has frequently sabotaged my very happiness. For the ego long ago hijacked reason, focusing its business instead on the linear world which, in my advancing years, is not only pale by comparison, but has also contributed to misery and depletion. After all, reason and the intellect only take a person so far. Once you’re truly at life’s edges, it is the heart, that terrain where God resides, that is the springboard of faith. It is the heart that is the holy ground where Love resides.

And so it is that I have become desperate for God, even in the face of my ongoing resistance and lack of habit.  This would strike me as funny if my spiritual state didn’t seem so serious! For I have become increasingly aware of an inability to live, let alone be happy, in a linear, worldly fashion, plotting and planning, organizing and mapping out my days. I have become bereft, it seems, unable to be ‘fed’ by anything the ego has to offer.

This inability, of course, requires a transcendence, a leap of faith that feels greater than my ability to exercise it. Yet exercise faith I must. Quite simply, there is no other way. Until such time as I reach some critical mass of lovingness, however, I often feel stuck, relegated instead to some no-man’s land practicing surrender, which does yield astounding outcomes at times, most visibly, peace; peace and an all-encompassing loving that is indescribable. Other times, however, practicing faith in God consciously, continuously, is no small feat. When struggling with it, I lapse automatically under the ego’s spell.

Yet the power of holiness, God’s infinite love planted in the heart, sits silent, waiting for my next acknowledgement. Miraculously, each time that acknowledgement occurs, faith is automatic, instantaneous, subtle, even if seemingly temporary. My charge now is to surrender more and more, with the faith that it will someday be the only thing from which I consciously operate.  There simply is no other way. For in the end, the heart, which is to say God’s love, governs all things, however I may have previously viewed life through the ego’s lens.  The heart is the seat of holy ground and it is everywhere, and the only thing I long for. Quite simply, it is the only thing that makes any sense at all.