adapted to seek God

You know that Indigo Girls song about Virginia Woolf that goes "So I know it's all right. Life will come and life will go. So I know it's all right, cause I just got a letter to my soul." That's how I feel right now. I was glancing at my bookshelf the other day and found Evelyn Underhill's The Spiritual Life. I read it years ago, but couldn't remember its content. So this morning I started reading it...it's just a little book. But SO rich in its pages. SUCH a good reminder. Check this out: "for life means the fullest possible give and take between the living creature and its environment: breathing, feeding, growing, changing. And spiritual life, which is profoundly organic, means the give and take, the willed correspondence of the little human spirit with the Infinite Spirit; its feeding upon Him, its growth towards perfect union with Him, its response to His attraction and subtle pressure. That growth and that response may seem to us like a movement, a journey, in which by various unexpected and often unattractive paths, we are drawn almost in spite of ourselves - not as a result of our own over-anxious struggles - to the real end of our being, the place where we are ordained to be: a journey that is more like the inevitable movement of the iron flying to the great magnet that attracts it, than like the long and weary pilgrimage in the teeth of many obstacles from 'this world to that which is to come.' Or it may seem like a growth from the childlike, half-real existence into which we are born into a full reality."

The first half of this quote is the Eucharist, yes? And the second, calling. I love this. Makes me relax and just surrender to that pull and stop agonizing about it. To just pray and be in God and enjoy that reality.

Okay, bear with me. One more quote: "This, of course, is what religion is about; this adherence to God, this confident dependence on the unchanging. This is the more abundant life which, in its own particular language and own particular way, it calls us to live. Because it is our part in the one life of the whole universe of spirits, our share in the great drive towards Reality, the tendency of all life to seek God, who made it for Himself and now incites and guides it, we are already adapted to it, just as a fish is adapted to live in the sea. This view of our situation fills us with a certain awed and humble gladness. It delivers us from all niggling fuss about ourselves, prevents us from feeling self-important about our own little spiritual adventures, and yet makes them worthwhile as part of one great spiritual adventure."

sigh. Thanks, Evelyn.