I believe devotion is perhaps the single most important and neglected issue in contemporary spiritual practice.
Part of that neglect I think is due to the challenge that faces anyone who tries to describe devotion. Devotion is actually a very difficult subject to discuss. It’s a tough term to define. I’ve been practicing a devotionally oriented form of spirituality almost my entire life and I still have a hard time expressing what exactly it is. What have I been doing all these years? Why have I stuck with devotion? What has devotion taught me? What gifts has she bestowed on me?
In my heart I have a deep sense of the answers to those questions but in practice I find it challenging to articulate. Still I think it’s important to try, knowing that all words will inevitably fall short of the mark. So in what follows i’m going to do my best to give a flavor to devotion. At least one man’s understanding of it anyway.
If I had to summarize devotion in one short phrase, I’d say: devotion is intimate relationship with The Heart of All Life and The Source of all Love.
Devotion is a fire. Devotion is the human heart finding its Maker and uncoiling in the presence of that Absolutely Loving One. Devotion is the doorway into Loving Presence.
It can help to learn what devotion is by contrasting it with other forms of spiritual practice (and learning what it’s not). In that sense, devotion can be distinguished from meditation and contemplation (at least conceptually). In meditation there is Realization–we are graced with the realization of who we most fundamentally are. We awaken to Consciousness as the Essence of all Life. In contemplation we are stunned in awe and wonder taking in the beauty, the harmony, the perfection of Creation.
In devotion however we must learn the art of surrender…from the heart. Surrendering into and as love. In devotion we learn to fall before the majesty of the Love that call us all into being.
In meditation the movement is more about accepting everything as it is (a wonderful practice). In contemplation, the movement is about beholding the beauty in all (also a wonderful practice).
Whereas in devotion, the movement is towards loving everything–loving each and every creation in its uniqueness.
In contemplation we experience ourselves as one part of the whole. In meditation we find our sense of self dissolve as we submerge into the depths of Being itself.
In devotion, however, we must first become whole. And that wholeness is what is then surrendered, sacrificed into Love.
Devotion is a radical act in our day. It subverts the central current of our contemporary Western world–namely the acquisitiveness of the self. Self-possession is the name of the game in our world.
Devotion, in contrast, is about self-emptying. In devotion we find that we become full in the moment that all of us is let go of and released into God, from the heart.
The prospect of surrender is why devotion is simultaneously so alluring and so terrifying. Whenever we talk surrender, it immediately rings an alarm bell within us, crying out:
Who or what are we surrendering to? And can it/he/she/they be trusted?
Other questions often follow in quick succession:
If I surrender, will I lose my mind, my control, even myself?
What if the surrendering overwhelms me?
The sister of Surrender is Trust (aka Faith). Whenever we inquire into surrender we inevitably must come to face the question of trust–who or what can be trusted? Who or what can be trusted with our surrendering?
Trust derives from the notion of a troth–one’s truth, one’s utter commitment, as for example in a marriage (see the root troth in the word bethrothal). One gives us one’s troth, one’s trust, one’s utter gift. This is devotion. And this is what our hearts are designed to do–they are designed to give this troth to The Creator, The King, The Queen of Love.
How can we recognize the one and only one who deserves our troth, who deserves the deepest level of our commitment?
This question lies at the heart of devotion. For one of the root meanings of the word devotion is “loyalty, fealty, or allegiance.”
Wherever we have a sense of deep and abiding faith or trust in someone or something and we surrender to that one, we automatically create deep feelings of loyalty, fealty, or allegiance. That is devotion.
And for that reason devotion is powerful and yet dangerous.
Dangerous because without a conscious intention and clear insight into who and what we devote to, devotion becomes profoundly unconscious. Devotion goes underground and expresses itself in unhealthy ways. As a result, we become devoted to money, power, self-glorification, or our own comfort–in so doing we become bound to the enslaving powers of our day.
Yet within devotion lies the seed of deep liberation.
Devotion is potentially very countercultural.
There’s so much that indicates we shouldn’t practice trust or surrender: political and institutional corruptions of all varieties, desecration of life, massive injustice, and pervasive cruelty. It’s much easier to remain in a state of apathy or despair.
But done properly, devotion awakens justice, forgiveness, mercy, and a deep burning desire for a more perfect reality than the we occupy currently.
In order to experience those graces, however, we must come face to face with The Beloved, The Lord of All. This face to face encounter is a naked one. We are stripped bare before The All Loving, All Holy One. We find however that we are looked upon only in Love.
Only such a one, only one who loves us absolutely, is deserving of our troth. Only such a one deserves our fealty, our loyalty. Only such a one deserves our surrender, deserves our trust.
And what devotional practice has taught me above all else is that there is such a one. We may call this one by many many different names–with each of the names contributing some further dimension of the unending mystery. But there is such a one.
And when we approach this one in a devotional way–that is the in the way of naked humility and trust–we experience something we can experience in no other way. Namely we learn that we are loved, we are forgiven, we are made in goodness, we are appreciated and delighted in at the most fundamental level.
As exalted and poetically rich as the language of devotion can be, devotion is also as simple as sitting on the ground and opening our hands and reaching out in love. It’s a simple as kneeling on the floor and bowing our forehead to the earth, submitting ourselves to Love. The capacity for devotion lies within all of us. It simply needs to be nurtured and cultivated.