Weavings

While walking in the late summer woods recently I came across an opening and found blackberries ripening in the afternoon sun. The berries sparkled like small dark orbs, like “thickened wine,” as the poet Seamus Heaney put it in his poem Blackberry Picking. After tasting the sweetness of the first one I eagerly gathered the closest berries, and eventually extended my arm further into the thicket to pluck the ones just out of reach. In no time small thorns wrapped my arm like a sleeve and as I tried gingerly to pull away the skin tore and the few berries I was clutching dropped to the ground.

As I continued to walk, feeling the sting of the scratches on my arm, I recalled how easily I was trapped by the thicket when I extended my grasp. It reminded me of all those unhealthy attachments– numerous addictions, for example to busyness and food; compulsive behaviors, like the need to control and possess– that grab at our psyches and take hold.

The Gospel calls us to empty self but we struggle mightily. We easily become entangled and assume that the spiritual path costs too much and should be left to those more prepared and dedicated than ourselves. No wonder words like detachment, emptying, releasing, letting go, and self-denial are so difficult to discuss and so readily the source of misinterpretation and fear.

So where do we begin? Reading John of the Cross, a mystic who has put off many by his talk of negation, I realized that his emphasis on self-denial is always in the context of a love relationship. “Where have you hidden, Beloved, and left me moaning?” is the opening line of his “Spiritual Canticle.” Our personal experience of God’s love affects us profoundly and inspires a transformation process; love itself fires the will so that we can do our part in freeing the heart. In the process we discover freedom, an inner spaciousness that allows us to love God, others and creation in the way we were meant to.

Of course this invitation to self denial holds true for any maturing love relationship; we are inspired to sacrifice for the sake of the one who has stolen our heart. We willingly release self-interest and accept emptying for the sake of love. This insight has helped me whenever I struggle with letting go. I recount how God first loved me in a personal way and how this love is the only love that can satisfy the hunger of my heart. St. Paul has the same insight in his Letter to the Philippians: “For his (Jesus Christ’s) sake I have forfeited everything; I have accounted all else as rubbish so that Christ may be my wealth” (Phil 3:8) This language of Paul may sound radical but it is simply the expression of a person who has fallen in love with the one who matters most.