Lesson 120: Review of
Lesson 109: I rest in God, and
Lesson 110: I am as God created me.
I need a vacation. It’s not like I can go anywhere, though. I can’t rent a cabin in the woods, or even take a day-trip to a brewery I haven’t tried yet, let alone jet off to some far-flung place on the map. In this time of pandemic, a change of scenery outside of my own living room and neighborhood is pretty much off limits.
But, I still need a vacation. I need a chance to rest – a chance to not be responsible for anything or anyone other than my personal needs and my pets. No deadlines, no pressure, no expectation from anyone else. I really feel the need to lay on the couch and stare at the ceiling for a week.
Even then, I doubt I’ll feel rested and refreshed and ready to dive back into the work that will inevitably pile up. Vacations in this bodily world are one of the biggest illusions – the idea that we can even “get away from it all” is pretty funny once you think about it. We seek to escape this dream by creating a different dream in a different location.
It’s exhausting.
Real rest, the lesson reminds us, doesn’t require time off. It doesn’t require a ticket to another location outside of ourselves. It simply requires that we rest in the perfect quiet and certainty that is God. All this busyness – all these deadlines, all these demands we see on ourselves – it’s not real. Sure, we have to do what’s required to keep our bodies clothed, fed and sheltered – but there is no true rest from any of that. Instead, rest comes when we can see through all of the illusions of the bodily world and know that there is a place of stillness and peace waiting for us – waiting to be recognized and enjoyed.
Even in the midst of bodily demands and pressure, our Creator invites us into this stillness – to experience it so deeply that we operate from this place even among the busyness our bodily world demands. Rest is available even amid the pressure of daily life. Rest is the place we must operate from to be God’s teachers and channels of love in the world.
Rest first, this lesson says, then nothing we have to do in this world will exhaust us. Instead, we will be energized by the love that we allow to flow through us from this place of peaceful, divine rest. After all, this is what we were created to do.
Hafiz sees this kind of rest as the silence beyond the silence. He writes:
“Different trees grow various heights and then
perish and evolve into another species.
“They reach their limbs – their souls –
a little deeper into incandescence’s well
“and then tell the world by their marvelous
appearance what that life is like.
“Yes, try to do that before you depart this
wondrous place we are visiting:
“bring us some good tidings of silence
beyond any silence you have heard.”
Photo by Simon Migaj on Unsplash