Pilgrim's Heart

I have permission to include this post by Lazarus on my own blog. I so appreciated it that I wanted to share it with my readers. It is from Lazarus of Hyacinth over at Oasis: http://lazarus-oasis.blogspot.com/2010/11/pilgrims-heart.html. Thank you Lazarus for kindly allowing me to post this here. Please do visit his blog. He is a very wise man.


The innocence of childhood is soon replaced by the prejudices of culture and country, which we learn to wear as if they were a fine suit of clothes.

The happy, carefree smile of our youth is soon replaced by the tightly drawn, thin lips of self-righteousness, bitterness, and disdain for others, who are seen as intruders into our petty kingdoms. Our modes of experience, knowing, and feeling are reduced to what is 'approved' and 'acceptable' within the little niche we have carved out for ourselves in the world, and so are narrowed accordingly, cutting us off from mystery and wonder.

And so Jesus tells us that we must become as little children, and only then do we begin to sense that interior Light and Voice of Spirit, to acquire another way of knowing and feeling that beckons us to move beyond our self-centered prison, to break the chains of our enslavement.

In our sad state, the narrower our vision became, the more everything became centered around us alone, the more we sat as judge and jury in our own court of last resort, and so we became cut off from the possibilities of encounter, and shielded ourselves against communion with the other, aside from the opportunity to advance our own interests. Worse than a blind man is the one who has eyes, but refuses to even look. The lone duck in his small pond does not believe the duck who has been to the great lake and seen the huge flocks, even less can he conceive of the ocean.

By means of The Jesus Prayer the Holy Spirit begins to cause all this self-centeredness to come crashing down, as a different Light of Knowledge appears in the heart, expanding outwards into the mind and body. We begin to perceive things at first in small flashes that shake our most cherished confidences, and then at times it comes in a flood that sweeps everything else away but the blazing Light that to our pride of life is like a drowning. A death is happening to us, a transformation and birth is taking place.

And once we begin to see things from heaven's point of view, we will never be the same again. A wounding will take place in the heart, and it is the wound of knowing that, beyond any doubt, there exists a type of love that can NEVER be enough.

Once we have tasted of that sweetness, we shall be forever bound to journey into that Infinity... forever seeking within the Unfolding Mystery the Wonder of the next embrace...