Occasionally over the last few months, I’ve noticed, in my spiritual practices and at times of both joy and sorrow, moments of experience that I can only describe using the word “holding.” These are unfamiliar experiences because I cannot even say they are experiences of “being held,” which I’ve had in moments of pain sometimes, or moments of inquiry at others. So I’ve characterized them to others as “a holding without a holder.”
No one can be on a spiritual path in any way (hardly even on a life path) without having had some or multiple experiences of being held. And because our earliest experiences related to being held in the arms of mothers and fathers and grandparents and others, it soon seems obvious to our young forming egos that the holding comes from outside ourselves, and throughout life that’s where we expect to receive it—how many countless love songs include “hold me” in the lyrics?
But what if all that external holding, actually summoning the experience of being held, of “holding,” is at the core of our soul’s existence? A “holding” that is the basis of all souls’ entry into manifestation out of the Divine Oneness? You could say, although still dualistically, that it is the inner “holding” that is always with us; that, in fact, is our true nature as children of the Divine.
We are, as the Jewish philosopher Elliott Wolfson writes, the recipients of “an irreducible and unconditional givenness in which the distinction between giver and given collapses.”
Or, in even more practical terms, Elizabeth Boyden Howes lectured about a “power—a resource, whatever the name—this resource is present; it is a Presence. It is a ‘given;’ it is an a priori numinous ‘given’ in the nature of things, and we can experience it. We know we are experiencing it when we have decreased tension, opened up of our heart, and found a clarity of mind.
Richard Rohr advises that we surrender in faith to this “Bigger Pattern,” and this is what experiences of being held, whether with a “holder” or not, allow to deepen that existential trust:
At our low points, we are one step away from either enlightenment or despair, says Father Rohr. Without faith that there is a Bigger Pattern, and the grace to surrender to that Bigger Pattern, most people will move into despair, negativity, or cynicism. We need a promise, a hopeful direction, or it is very hard not to give up. When you have not yet learned what transformation feels or looks like, someone—perhaps some loving human or simply God’s own embrace—needs to hold you now because you cannot hold yourself.
When we experience this radical holding, and even deep loving, this is salvation!
Perhaps the poet May Sarton said it most simply in this one stanza: “There is in each of us a healing mother.”
Shalom.
