San Xulian to Boente (Day 3): going with the flow

My very first steps, Day 1, onto the path of the Camino, took me over a bridge across a gurgling brook.  For 3 days, I walked next to various streams of gently flowing water.  This flow, this cleansing water, this movement, became a contemplative focus and key imagery for me along my journey. 

Sometimes we need fresh ways to think about God and our spirituality.  For me, this is it.  There is an ongoing, inexhaustible source of love and joy, grace and goodness, forgiveness and new creation flowing in and around me at all times.  Its waters cleanse and cover, refine and heal.  Its power shapes and moves all in its flow. 

What in me resists living in this flow? How have I battled against the current and worked to direct the path myself?  How does fear, shame, ego work with opposing force against my desire to live fully into the flow, and instead actually uses energy to build a dam and close off this living water?  

As I walked, as I heard the babbling of a brook, as I laid my burden rocks down on the majones each day, I considered such things and my prayers and meditation focused on openness, surrender, stepping into, and literally “going with the flow”.

At the Trinitarian level, God is a verb more than a noun, God is a flow more than a substance, God is an experience more than a deity sitting on a throne. And we live naturally inside that flow of love—if we do not resist it.  –Richard Rohr