Spacious Enough

Listening

Opening myself to hear More.

I've been sitting with Wu Wei lately — the practice of unforced action, of moving without straining against the moment. It led me into some reading about the monks at the Shaolin Temple, and one teacher's words on how Wu Wei is used there not to empty the mind of effort, but to sharpen focus.

What stopped me wasn't the technique. It was where the teaching pointed. He said that when you strip everything away — the beliefs you've collected, the ego, the experiences you can get lost chasing — you're left with one source. And the practice isn't reaching for a hundred different peaks. It's coming home, again and again, to that one source.

He was writing from within Zen Buddhism, not from my own tradition. But I sat with it anyway, because I recognized what he was describing. I've spent a long season learning names for the same thing — centering prayer, Lectio Divina, the sitting practice of Contemplative Outreach. Different doors, built by different hands, in different centuries, in different languages. And still — the same one source at the center of all of them, patient, waiting to be come home to.

That's when the spaciousness of it hit me. Not that all paths are the same path — I don't believe that, and I don't think the monk did either. But that God is spacious enough to meet a person wherever the door they were given happens to open. Spacious enough that a Zen teacher's words about focus could hand a Christian mystic back her own home, from a completely different room in the house.

Selah. Stop and consider. Maybe that's the whole practice, under any name: coming home to the One source, however you got let in.