In his essay "Spiritual Laws" Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote:

"The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations that our life might be much easier and simpler than we make it; that the world might be a happier place than it is; that there is no need of struggles, convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the gnashing of the teeth; that we miscreate our own evils....Whenever we get this vantage point...of a wiser mind in the present, we are able to discern that we are begirt with laws which execute themselves.... Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment."

The apostle Paul puts it this way: "For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self." Tucked away in Romans 7 are these three words, "my inmost self." This is the place of "God In You." This is the place of repose, of a "right and perfect contentment." No other will do!

Let us name this place. This inmost self is our "inner of inners," our "spiritual sanctum," our "intimate abode," our holy of holies, our true selves, where words nor doctrines reign supreme but where communion is the river, the stream, the soul, the law of God that "executes itself" in us.

The "voice of our beloved," which for me is the voice of our God, from this very place calls to us to "come away" (as in the text of Song of Solomon). If we are to truly delight, love, feel, experience union with God, then we must come away. This is another way of saying that the spiritual journey we need today is a journey to go in, into the terrain and vast frontier of our inmost self, where God dwells and where God waits for us.

To do this we must relinquish our fixation on the outer world of externals--things, machines, inventions, goods, products, objects -- in order to find the spiritual law we have relegated to the background and periphery of our lives. We must also be willing to renounce all the detractions and distractions of our surface realities, of surface knowing, and of our surface intimacy. The spiritual laws of God do not execute themselves from the surface of our lives, but from the inmost self. Meaning, ultimate meaning and purpose in life, is not conferred from outside of us, but from within, from God In You.

Walt Whitman shares this call with us in his poem "A Voice from Death."

Thou that in all the life of and death of us,
in action or in sleep!
Thou laws invisible that permeate them and all,
Thou that in all, and over all, and
through and under all, incessant!
Thou! Thou! the vital, universal,
giant force resistless, sleepless, calm,
Holding humanity as in thy open hand...
How ill to e'er forget thee.

For I too have forgotten
(Wrapt in these little potencies of progress, politics, culture, wealth, inventions, civilization),
Have lost my recognition of your
Silent ever-swaying power,
Ye mighty, elemental throes,
In which and upon which we float,
And every one of us is buoy'd."

In this place of what Whitman calls the "incessant, vital, universal, mighty," we return to our true freedom from all that would contain, condition, and confine our true power, virtue, wisdom, and contentment. Indeed, the gospel of Jesus Christ is the gospel of freedom; freedom from the hold of sin in our lives, "in our members" (to use Paul's words); freedom from the hold of death, even in this life; and freedom from "the evil that lies close at hand."

Now we dare to see that the enemy does not lie outside of ourselves, but is in us; now we dare to confess that the evil we project onto others is the evil that has held sway in us; now the sin we judge and condemn in others we face in ourselves, knowing that no longer can and will our ego, ignorance, arrogance, selfishness, hate, anger, violence, hide in the crevices of our minds and hearts and bodies; no longer will our words and actions come from the contradictions of split spiritualities but from the wholeness, the power, the virtue, the wisdom, the contentment--the law and laws--of God in our inmost self.

Here the demons begin to flee! Here what spooks us is swallowed up! Here the wretchedness of conditioned lives gives way to delight and joy and contentment! Here your exhaustion becomes a "smiling repose" (to use Emerson's words)! Here you pick up the yoke of Jesus, for it is easy and light! Here you learn from Jesus the way of selflessness, entrega, a giving up of yourself, for the sake of the world! Here there is no judgment to pass, but life to give! Here all are "buoy'd" in you, for you are in God and God is in you!

Now you begin to do what you really want to do--serve God, love God, embrace all of humanity, live at peace with yourself and others.

Amen.