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The Spiritual Journey When applied to the spiritual life, the metaphor of a journey is both helpful and somewhat misleading. Helpfully it reflects the fact that the essence of spirituality is a process—specifically, a process of transformation. Unhelpfully it obscures the fact that we are already what we seek and where we long to arrive—specifically, in God. Once we realize this, the nature of the journey reveals itself to be more one of awakening than accomplishment, more one of spiritual awareness than spir- itual achievement. There are, however, two very good reasons to describe the spir- itual life in terms of a journey. First, it fits well with our experience. We are aware that the self that begins the spiritual journey is not the same as the one that ends it. The changes in identity and con- sciousness—how we understand what it means to be me and our inner experience of passing through life—are both sufficiently pro- found as to be best described as transformational. The same is true for the changes in our capacity for love and the functioning of our will and desires. The second reason is that the spiritual journey involves following a path. Much more than adopting a set of beliefs, a path is a practice or set of practices that will characterize our whole life. Following
this path is the way we participate in our transformation. It is the way we journey into God and, as we do, discover that all along we have already been in God. It is the way our identity, consciousness and life become grounded in our self-in-God and God’s self-in-us. Christian spirituality is taking on the mind and heart of Christ as we recognize Christ as the deepest truth of our being. It is ac- tualizing the Christ who is in us. It is becoming fully and deeply human. It is experiencing and responding to the world through the mind and heart of God as we align ourselves with God’s transfor- mational agenda of making all things new in Christ. It is partici- pating in the very life of God. This trilogy describes the foundational Christian practice of surrender, how this practice emerges as a response to Perfect Love, and the changes this produces in our identity, will and deepest desires. Each of the three books focuses on one of these strands while interweaving it with the others. Together they serve as a manual for walking the spiritual path as God’s heart and mind slowly but truly become our own. The Spiritual Journey trilogy includes: Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery Desiring God’s Will: Aligning Our Hearts with the Heart of God