Prayer of Confession

My spiritual direction group this morning worked through an article on the (originally monastic) practice of solitude as a way to achieve spiritual integrity. The article built on the 4th-century Christian "desert fathers" and their conviction that mainstream society was "a shipwreck from which each [person] had to swim for his life." Our at-large society, and perhaps even the sub-communities we join within it, is a "dangerous network of domination and manipulation" that seems to inextricably require that we abandon our religious principles in order to participate. We "children of the light" are coopted to becom "conspirators with darkness." One solution, then, is not to participate: to swim for your life to a place where you can be, with other escapees, continually in touch with the spiritual center of your life. Monks call this practice "solitude."

The clincher for me, though, was the post-monastic idea that solitude of this sort is an attitude, a state of mind, not a physical location. It does not require being removed from the culture, just being apart from it. Imagine that! Imagine if we were to truly cultivate a life where in each moment we tried to act from a deeper place than the culturally-expected focus on the self: imagine acting in each moment from a deeply centered connection to the Spirit of Life and Love, the Ground of Being, the Word of Ultimate Truth...however you concieve of the spiritual reality known in western cultural shorthand as "God".

Imagine with me what that would look like. If our daily life were not dominated by what the article I read calls "main enemies of the spiritual life" (self-exaggerations such as Fear, Anger, and Greed that put our own concern so squarely in our focus-of-vision that we cannot see past it), but instead were punctuated by a continual series of attempts to connect to and act out of the deeper spiritual ground of our being...we would become the spiritual beings we were made to be. We would be like Christ, or the Buddha, or Gandhi, or ML King Jr. Insert your religious radical here.

We would react to each encounter with another not in terms of their expediency to us (I said I wanted chips, not fries!), or their obstacle-ness in our rush to make every meeting and deadline, or their potential to harm us...but rather we would see them each as an imago Dei, an image of God, a person containing the same Divine Spark we contain. Each person would be our teacher, and each person our pupil: the God in Me would seek to connect with the God in the Other. There would be no need to trot out that well-worn First Principle of "Inherent worth and dignity," for that worth would be manifest and obvious to us. If we could truly practice solitude-from-society in every moment of our lives, we would begin to create an alternate society, to form the Beloved Community right here in the midst of the world of selfish darkness.

As I was reading this, I realized that I have failed to live up to my religious principles here in the very beginning of my seminary journey. I have been letting fear and anger and greed dominate when I should be acting out of a true desire to know the pieces of Truth that my fellow Images of God have brought to me here, to offer me for my own deepening in faith. And so, I found myself composing in my head a very classic Christian piece: the following prayer of confession. And now that I've got that out, I feel so much more at peace. For now.

Great Spirit of Love and Life, from which every Blessing flows,
I confess that I have not loved your children with my whole being:
Out of fear of losing my own perspective,
I have shut out the perspectives of others;
Out of hurt that others had not considered my feelings,
I have allowed anger to fester in my heart;
Out of an experience of being singled out,
I have seen oppression and exclusion when they were not there;
Out of a desire to be fed the fruits of my own tradition,
I have been un-thankful for the food freely given me by others.
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
that I may truly be in communion with your many and varied children here,
that I may truly learn the lessons of the perspective I have been given,
that I may be a vessel for your healing love and grace,
and that I may be of greater service to you and your creations.
Amen