The Welcoming Prayer
[“Welcome, welcome, welcome. I welcome everything that comes to me today, because I know it’s for my healing. I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations, and conditions. I let go of my desire for power and control. I let go of my desire for affection, esteem, approval, and pleasure. I let go of my desire for survival and security. I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person or myself. I open to the love and presence of God and God’s action within. Amen” (Thomas Keating, OCSO; 1923-2018).]
O Lover,
During recent triaging of personal writings in the interests of downsizing I repeatedly came upon documents and correspondence copies reflecting the decisions, judgments, and auras of my earlier life. Some of this “retrieval” has left me feeling uncomfortable and waxing regurgitative, occasionally fixational. On the one hand, I stumbled upon certain negative memories thought to have been put to rest via forgiveness and/or healing, and then moved beyond; revealed as well were various evidences of positive growth which I thought I had handled in a healthy manner. While I have long viewed myself as nostalgic, as having a strong facility for recapitulating and reliving the past, now I was coming to view this gift more ambivalently. In contrast to earlier decades when I experienced release and peace in the aftermath of a wide range of episodes, as an octogenarian I was seemingly more tempted to re-work issues decades old. Interestingly, my dreams, many involving persons and situations, often scored with decades-old hymns, were unprecedentedly shaping my moods upon awakening.
Amid the above somewhat puzzling pattern, I was recently reminded by a family member of the above “Welcoming Prayer” by Thomas Keating. It has become yet more self-evident that part of my excessive mental recycling of the past is rooted in a failure to let go. So what is it that I need to relinquish? Ah, let me count the ways! But more to the point, what is the foundational dynamic thus impairing my unítas with You, O Lover?
I find the answer to that last question, one with which I have circled in earlier posts, has to do with control. I am prone to expending mental static in seeking to SECURE on a wide range of fronts: my history (retrieved and/or crafted) as a person both good and of value; my identity as a fabricated, individuated and egoic self, both now and “after”; my self-monitoring as to how things are going, particularly regarding internal moods; my repeated need for experiential reassurance regarding that You are, who You are, and where/when You are (here & now). The most obvious tag of this list, far from comprehensive, is its first-person pronouns; the most far-reaching implication is my only selective welcoming of You into my entire reality.
In my anecdotage I am experiencing You relentlessly inviting me to a wall-to-wall gelássenheit (“surrender”) with no asterisks. Contracting with You, whether via creed, disciplines, or willpower, I do. But to hold EVERYTHING—every wounded or epiphanic memory, every disappointment or triumph, every ”now” whether splendiferous or fecal—as a home into which I receive You, that has been, and will remain, my final and unfinished vocation. Keating’s prayer has skewered my attention insofar as it exposes how my cherry-picked welcoming of You exposes me to the chatter, retrospective and monological, troubling me.
A learning from my dilemma is that I am apparently not as comfortable with delimitedness as I have thought I was. To be at peace with one’s creatureliness is to be accepting of finitude, flux, distractiblility, needfulness, and mortality rather than attaching to perfectionism or some other ideal construct. Your propensity for incarnátio (“[You] with us”), Your irrevocable embracing of finitude, means that the perfect time for welcoming You is always now, the only ideal setting whatever.
And so I want indiscriminately to extend hospitality to You whether in good times or ill, ecstasy or aridity, esteem or degradation, spring or autumn, light or darkness, thriving or entropy, life or death. My house is what it is: welcome home to it, always and comprehensively, O Lover!
