Getting Lost In The Woods

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” - C.S. Lewis

Last year, I was given a double-dog-dare . I was dared, by God himself, to give myself over to Him. Formally. Completely.

Since that time, my life has turned inside out. I’m on the road to becoming Catholic. Never, in a million years, would I have placed myself here. But that’s what happens when you hand your Life over.

Grace walks in the door and yells, “Surprise!!!” And it’s never what you expect.

It’s also, always the most perfect thing. So perfect, in fact, you never could have written it so well.

The days that I dare to let go and hand it over, a great weight is lifted from my shoulders. A peace comes over me that is otherwise unexplainable. Nothing really bothers me. I feel calm; at Home; guided in a way that I’ve never before been guided.

There’s a ‘sureness’ to my days now that have never been here before. A knowing of certain things that I could not previously put my finger on.

I’ve never felt so held.

In my New Age days - which I’m so grateful for now - I held God as this impersonal, nebulous Ghost that sort of floated in the background waiting to lower the boom at a moment’s notice.

If there was any definable ‘relationship’ it was one of reward and punishment. I floated the word “karma” around a lot like a little sword that could both inflict pain on others’ and myself.

When I see it with clear eyes now, it was such a painful and isolating relationship.

I was officially lost in the woods.

We come to firmly believe that if we could just heal our hurts and right our wrongs and vote for the right person and fix what is broken than everything will be okay.

But that is just more ‘lost in the woods’ stuff. That is just turning down different paths with different names thinking that “this time!!!!” we’ll surely get it.

But do you want to know a secret that I’ve been let in on? That I could only have been let it in on in these past several months?

It was never about anything in this physical world. Our physical worlds (which are all different and unique to each and every Soul that walks this planet) are simply manifestations of ONE THING.

LOVE.

And this can go one of two ways.

Your worldly life is either a manifestation of Conditional Love or it is a manifestation of Unconditional Love.

It’s that simple.

Either you exist to make up for what you think you’ve done, your shortcomings, your apparent lack, your bad behaviour, your unworthiness….OR you exist in the image and likeness of God.

In other words, YOU ARE LOVED NO MATTER WHAT.

Karma, then, becomes a silly, silly notion.

My old self would seriously be shocked reading these words!

Even ‘healing’, as we’ve come to know it and bear it, takes on a different gleam.

Healing becomes an act of Love. Your steps are guided precisely because of this Unconditional Relationship. It sounds insane but it is the most sane thing in the world.

It is no longer about ‘getting rid of the gnarly bits’ to reveal ‘the good bits.’

It is to come into profound and reverential relationship with God.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. How is loving something ‘out there’ supposed to change my life ‘in here?’

But it’s that very thinking that’s gotten so warped. This is what is slowly, blindingly, being revealed to me as I walk this journey.

It is that there is ONE thing in this ever expanding Universe that could possibly love us without condition. And that is God. And without that Unconditional Love, we will flounder and flail about trying to fix everything that appears broken.

And of course, so much appears broken.

But under Love’s gaze, nothing is broken.

Under Love’s gaze, it is all a heartbreakingly profound invitation to return Home; to come back into the embrace of The One who made us, revealed a path to us, and has been calling us back ever since.

And it is that very invitation to COME BACK that reveals the gold that was always lying in wait inside of us.

So instead of trying to find just the right path in the woods, the entire landscape changes. The paths are wiped away. Completely.

Finally, it is just about YOU and GOD.

It is unfathomable and words could not dare to come to close to describing what this looks like; what this feels like.

For me, God knew that walking this formal, Catholic path would force my hand to come down to my knees again and again and again.

That instead of meditating on an “impersonal Universe” that there had to be a marriage of sorts.

It HAD to be personal.

This is what the New Age promise misses. That, in the attempted obliteration of the individual self - which is more likely a trauma response than anything else - there is a wiping away of a reciprocal love.

It is in this reciprocal love that everything changes.

To come face to face with The One who loves you beyond what you could possibly imagine finally breaks the shell of your greatest pain.

And that greatest pain has been that you have not been worthy of this love in the first place.

It is what set every trauma, hurt, illness, grief, loss, shame, rage and dysfunction in motion.

It was the Original Switch that was flipped.

And there’s only one way out.

Flip the Switch back on.

Come face to face with God.