The Secret Place

Stage Three — Abiding: How should one remain?

My friend,

You have crossed a threshold, and I want to mark it before we go on.

You have laid foundations. You have had your eyes worked on. You know, more or less, how a person of this road should live, and you have begun to see the world without some of the veils that used to hang over it.

What lies ahead is less about acquiring new things and more about becoming at home in what you have already found. You have seen the light. Now you must learn to live in it.

The question changes accordingly. It was how should one see? Now it is: how should one remain?

The shift is from glimpsing to dwelling — from being a guest who visits the truth to being a resident who lives there. And it must come before the next stage, before community, because a person who has not learned to remain steady alone will not remain steady among others. We cannot offer a home to anyone while we are still wandering.

Desire Is Not the Enemy

Our guide here is the Song of Songs, and I know how that sounds.

When I first opened it as an instrument of spiritual formation, I assumed a mistake had been made. I had absorbed, without ever examining it, the belief that holiness required the starvation of desire — that the goal was to become disciplined, unmoved, and quietly bloodless. I thought maturity meant wanting less.

That belief nearly ruined me, and it took years to dislodge, so let me put the correction as directly as I can:

You are not formed by your ideas. You are formed by your loves.

Desire is not an enemy to be executed. It is a real power, currently pointed in scattered directions, that has to be healed and turned toward its actual home. A man who merely suppresses his desires has not become holy. He has become a man with suppressed desires, which is a different and often meaner thing.

The Song maps the movement of a heart that has learned this:

Take me away with you. Let us hurry. The king has brought me into his rooms. — Song of Solomon 1:4

The movement is from the outer courts into the inner rooms. And notice what happens to the grammar as the poem goes on — the isolated I becomes a we:

My beloved is mine, and I am his. — Song of Solomon 2:16

That is the sentence of a person who has stopped negotiating and started belonging.

The Song is also honest about how this actually goes, which is why it is in the curriculum and not merely in the anthology:

By night on my bed, I sought him whom my soul loves. I sought him, but I didn't find him... I had scarcely passed from them, when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him, and would not let him go. — Song of Solomon 3:1, 4

Seeking. Not finding. Getting up and searching anyway. Then finding, and holding on.

If your experience of God has included long stretches of not finding — this is the pattern, it is in Scripture, and it is not evidence that something has gone wrong with you.

The Pillars as the Walls of a House

In this stage the three pillars stop being tools and become architecture. They are the walls of the room you live in.

Truth is no longer a set of propositions you affirm. It is the light in the room where you are standing — something you move around inside rather than something you hold.

Humility is freedom from self-preoccupation, and here it does specific work: it produces the silence in which another voice can be heard. You cannot hear anything while performing. Humility is the ability to be in someone's presence without needing to justify your being there.

Mercy becomes atmosphere rather than effort. As you remain, you begin to reflect the care of the One you are remaining in, and it stops feeling like something you are producing.

And underneath all three, the discipline of unknowing — now grown domestic. You become comfortable with the fact that reality exceeds your grasp. To remain is to stay in God's presence while still not understanding a great deal, which is the only kind of remaining any of us actually does.

The Witness

How lovely are your dwellings, Yahweh of Armies! My soul longs, and even faints for the courts of Yahweh. My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. Yes, the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young, near your altars, Yahweh of Armies, my King, and my God. Blessed are those who dwell in your house. They are always praising you.

Psalm 84:1–4

The sparrow is the image to keep.

A small, unremarkable bird has found a place to build. Not a visit — a nest, where she raises her young, which is to say where the whole ordinary business of her life happens. And the place she has found is near the altar.

Your soul is looking for that nest. Abiding is finding it. It is the move out of the exhaustion of longing and into being rooted.

Test this. David sang the same purified thirst in the wilderness: God, you are my God. I will earnestly seek you. My soul thirsts for you. My flesh longs for you, in a dry and weary land, where there is no water (Psalm 63:1). Note where he says it from. The dry land. Longing is not the opposite of abiding; it is often its first form.

The Practice: Entering the Room

Name what you actually want. Not what you should want. Sit down and be honest about your real desires — including the ones you are embarrassed by. You cannot redirect a desire you refuse to look at. This is between you and God and it need not be said aloud to anyone.

One unhurried quarter of an hour. Not to accomplish anything. Not to petition, not to work through a list. Fifteen minutes of remaining, in which the only task is to not leave. Your mind will wander constantly. Bring it back without comment. That bringing-back is the practice, and it is not the interruption of it.

Return without ceremony. When you notice you have drifted — during the fifteen minutes, or across a week — simply come back. No self-recrimination, which is only another way of making the drift about you.

Ask yourself this week: What do I actually love, as demonstrated by where my mind goes when it is unoccupied? Where am I visiting the truth rather than living in it?

A Blessing

May you find your nest near the altar. May your longing be recognized as the beginning of arrival rather than proof of exile.

And may you learn, slowly, the quiet joy of not having to leave.