Spiritual formation, I have come to believe, is not about steps or stages on the way to perfection. It’s about the movements from the mind to the heart through prayer in it’s many forms that reunite us with God, each other, and our truest selves. Fr. Henry Nouwen.
What are the many forms of prayer that move from the mind to the heart, have you wondered? The many forms are emotions of joy, pain, sadness, anger, disappointment, failure, fear, loss, and you can put into that list whatever your mind can think of. Then give it time to let them sink into your heart’s rhythm. Then they become prayer. They become the uniting element of grace.
What unites us with God are those raw realities that make us authentic human beings. None of us a perfect and none of us have the joy of perfection. What we have the joy of imperfection that is perfected in Christ when these painful and joyful moments pass through our hearts into the heart of God.
God knows the raw moments of our life. The beauty of a God-ward journey is that we will be able to let lose our hearts strings to tie into God’s heart to fly above them all. It is then we become our truest selves.