The Breath of God - by Deborah Smith Douglas
Personal experience has made me especially aware that anxiety and breathlessness are kin. I wish I could remember to breathe without having to be reminded. I regret how quickly I forget, how instantly I get slammed back into the place of anxiety, the place of held breath.
Deep, controlled breathing is not only vital to the health of body and quietness of mind, but it can connect us with the life-energy that fills the universe, that is the breath of God.
God is, as the fifteenth-century Sufi poet Kabir knew, “the breath within the breath.” (1) And that Breath is not so much something we breathe as a mystery that breathes us.
“Let the Breath breathe you,” my yoga teacher urges.
Hildegard of Bingen, a fourteenth century mystic, wrote that when her spirit flew, it was not because of anything in herself, but because God bore her up. She floated effortlessly, totally surrendered in perfect trust—a feather on the breath of God.
What a contrast to our own anxiety, with its constricting grip on mind and heart, the imprisoning narrowness of shallow breath. What a glorious possibility, to live not in the tight clutch of anxiety, but as feathers on the breath of God. (2)
Living as feathers on the breath of God is not, ultimately, something any of us—even the greatest saints—achieve. It is not an invitation, but a fact. That is the alarming reality of our situation: we really are (all our frantic illusions to the contrary notwithstanding) that vulnerable, that precarious, that radically not in control. But we are also that safe, that intimately close to the Breath that created, redeems, and sustains the universe in love.
2 "held...by God...like a feather which...lets itself be carried by the wind," letter by Hildegard to Guibert of Gem bloux, Matthew Fox, Hildegard of Bingen's Book of Divine Works(Bear and Co., 1987), cited in Mary Elizabeth O'Brien,Spirituality in Nursing (Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 2003), 32.[Adapted from “Feathers on the Breath of God,” Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol. XXV, No. 4, (Nashville, TN: The Upper Room, 2010), 6-12.]
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