Alienation and togetherness

There are moments when something touched the very root of our being.  It went to our heart.  We know from experience that such moments are moments of wholeness, of communion, moments when we feel one with all.

What triggers this sudden self-discovery of our heart may be a weighty decision, a blow of fate that hits us hard, a memorable encounter, a long-awaited event.  But more often what stirs us so deeply will be a surprisingly small matter, an everyday occurrence, something done a hundred times before.

There seems to be no reason why at the hundred and first time it should move us so amazingly, but it does.  A mother looks at her baby asleep every afternoon, yet today the sight floods her heart with gratefulness too deep for words.  Or it may be we walk the same path every day, yet this time the very ordinariness of the moment seizes our heart with extraordinary power.

It is almost impossible to capture such high points of aliveness in words.  But words can point to them and stir up memories.  What one remembers most about these moments of the heart is a deep, all pervading, overflowing sense of gratefulness.

This gratefulness is not the same as thanksgiving.  It gives rise to thanksgiving, but it lies deeper.  Even before it bursts forth into thanks to God or to life, the experience deserves the name gratefulness because it is one's full response to a gratuitously given moment.  When those two come together, gratuitousness and fullness, one is suddenly together.  One is responding from the heart, from that centre where all is together.

When we reach our innermost heart, we reach a realm where we are not only intimately at home with ourselves, but intimately united with others, all others.  The heart is not a lonely place.  It is the realm where solitude and togetherness coincide.   Can one ever say, "Now I am truly together with myself, yet I remain alienated from others"? Or could one say, "I am truly together with others, or even just with one other person I love, yet I remain alienated from myself"? No! The moment we are one with ourselves, we are one with all others.  We have overcome alienation.  And the heart stands for that core of being where, long before alienation, primordial togetherness held sway.

Those are the two poles of our most basic choice: alienation and togetherness, synonyms for sin and salvation.  "Sin" is a word that has lost much of its usefulness today.  Too many people just do not understand that term anymore.  But when I say "alienation" everyone knows what I mean.  The term suggests to our experience today something that is practically identical with what one used to call "sin" in the past.

Togetherness, on the other hand, is what our whole being longs for.  An older vocabulary called it "salvation." "Salvation" used to have that sense of an all-embracing wholeness, which the word "together" suggests to us.  In our innermost heart we know that wholeness is more basic, more primordial than alienation, and so we never quite lose an inborn trust that in the end we shall be whole and together.   Our heart holds the pledge, as it were, of a primordial promise.

Its fulfilment would mean being one and whole within myself.  It would mean being one with all others in peaceful communion.  Thus, it would mean no less than finding my true and all-embracing Self.  But it would mean still more.  When we really find our heart, we find the realm where we are intimately one with self, with others, and also with God.  Yes, that is the most amazing discovery: that in the depth of my heart, to borrow St. Augustine's words, "God is closer to me than I am to myself."




Adapted from Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer by David Steindell-Rast