Intimacy is a fickle thing. It’s deeply satisfying to our hearts. It’s often bewildering to our minds.
It’s a sad thing when intimacy falls away in relationships. Drip by drip, little by little, we can lose connection with those that mean the most to us.
Intimacy reflects a profound union of heart, mind, and soul.
We use the word love to capture the deep connection that comes with intimacy, and few things in this life bring us more joy. Ever notice how it’s the subject of half of history’s hit songs?
How can something so strong fade away, how can intimacy be so fickle? This is what the other half of hit songs are about.
The relationship rules with the Divine are much the same. Holy intimacy is deeply satisfying to our hearts, and bewildering to our minds. It can be fickle.
It’s a soul process. We feel union, joy, and it’s no surprise God is described as Love. And yet we can go through times when it fades, when even our intimacy with the Sacred seems to escape us. What causes this?
Each of our fears and the pressures of life can be like a brick that walls off connection with God. The more fears and pressures, the thicker the wall. And at such times, the Divide can feel distant, closed off to us, withholding, like someone we barely know. But deep down, we know, that the Spirit is trying to reach us, even if we can’t perceive it. So what do we do?
Like all human relationship, our Divine connection requires investment, adaptation, forgiveness, and creativity. Prayer, meditation, nature, worship, movement practices, reading sacred texts or spiritual books, poetry, there are many channels that can kindle Divine union. They require some commitment, and they’re worth it. They break down the wall and bring us back to love.
When we actively nurture our relationship with the Divine, the gifts of this connection are surprising and many. They become a well-spring for our thirsty human souls.
We enter a dynamic, reciprocal, and guiding relationship with our Higher Power.
We find our thoughts, desires, and actions increasingly aligned with what we believe is Holy.
We become prone to see synchronicities and to have mystical experiences.
We hold of the hard stuff of life more lightly and place it in a wide, spiritual frame.
We become more open and inclined to share the light of love that emanates from Divine intimacy.
Sounds great! And yet, no patter how committed we are to maintaining connectedness, there are still days when all of this feels so far away, “pie in the sky”. Too much trouble to always be practicing spirituality and Divine intimacy. Too many bricks of fear and pressure in the way anyhow. And that’s ok. Every spiritual sage in history had seasons of relative disconnection.
Our task in these seasons of lull is to keep up our inner drumbeat of hope and faith going. That way we can actually be awake for the in-breaking moments that always come, the intimate moments we so long for. Those subtle moments when we get a glimpse.
Our hearts are warmed. We sense things are going to be okay. We have just received a kiss on the cheek from the Divine. The intimacy is always there, always right *here. It is going to be okay.