{re}image advent | 12.3.17

I plopped into the chair, feeling the full weight of my body collapse beneath me. It was my first time in therapy, and I wasn’t sure what to expect each week. What I did know, however, was that I had a lot of work to do. I was unpacking and processing trauma from my recent birth, and at the same time going through my own internal spiritual migration. My amazing therapist was both a spiritual director and an LCSW certified in EMDR, so I knew she was just the right fit for me.

Before I placed the headphones on my ears to begin my first EMDR experience, I was directed to picture myself at a beach. I was to place myself at the beach and wait for God to meet me there. Feeling vulnerable and self-conscious, I committed to the exercise. I deeply inhaled the salty air and felt the breeze in my mind…and I waited. I waited and waited for God to come…but no one came. I sobbed in my therapists office that day, feeling deeply betrayed. I had devoted my whole life to God, and God couldn’t even show up for me when I made myself vulnerable to the Divine presence for the first time in a long while.

I drove home in a daze – angry, confused, and sad.

That night I had the most vivid dream. I was walking through a dense fog, and suddenly, I saw the head of a deer popping up through the murky white and looking at me intently. The deer went back to eating the grass, and I woke up.

As I awoke, I had an unmistakeable feeling that I was in the Divine presence. I felt an indescribable peace, and I knew that this dream was a mystical experience. I realized that day that God had not failed to meet me…I just wasn’t looking for the right image.

My spiritual life to that point had deeply embedded within me a metaphor of God as a man. I was sitting on that beach during EMDR waiting for a man to come and talk with me…but no man did. However, God met me in the fog. I realized that while my functional metaphor of God as a man no longer made spiritual sense to me, God was still there in the fog.

The new metaphor showed a side of God that permeated everything – that I could inhale into my lungs and exhale back into the world around me. This metaphor described a God that was immediate and present, and mysterious. A God that ebbed and flowed and existed right in the midst of the mess of the world – a constant, peaceful, permeating presence.

Sometimes our metaphors for God break down and no longer serve as a way for our human mind to dwell in God’s presence…but that doesn’t mean God is absent. Sometimes we are just looking for God in the wrong places, the wrong images, the wrong metaphors. Next time you feel a Divine absence, take some time to examine the images you are trying to recognize, and maybe make yourself open to the possibility that God is revealing God-self to you in a completely new way.

Photo by Paul Earle on Unsplash