The Spacious Place

Most of us know what it’s like to feel inwardly constricted. To feel trapped in anxiety, perhaps caught in resentment.

Most of us will have experienced our thoughts circling on a seemingly endless loop around some worry or fear. A time when it felt like we could not see beyond them and we seemed to lose all sense of freedom and perspective. A time when life seemed to shrink in on itself and become smaller, more constricted, tighter.

With this in mind, I think one of the most striking descriptions of prayer in scripture appears in Psalm 31: ‘You have set my feet in a spacious place.’ (Psalm 31:8) ‘A spacious place…’ Some translations say, ‘a wide open place.’

Psalm 31 is clearly not written by someone who has escaped the difficulties of life. It is the prayer of someone who feels threatened, overwhelmed, and afraid. Yet, in the midst of all they are facing, they discover that God has brought them to stand in a ‘spacious place’ – a place of open, liberated awareness in which they are shown God’s steadfast, unchanging love.

The Bible returns to this theme again and again. The Israelites are led out of the confinement of Egypt into a spacious land. The prophets speak of liberation and freedom. Saint Paul speaks of creation itself being set free from its bondage and brought into freedom (Romans 8:21). Again and again, God is the one who leads us from constriction into spaciousness and liberation.

The house of my soul is too small to receive you…

Saint Augustine develops this image in a beautiful way. For Augustine, the problem is not that God is ever absent, but that our mind can become too small, too contracted to notice God’s presence. Fear contracts the mind. Too much self-focus of a certain kind contracts the mind. Becoming fixated upon – trapped within – the endless commentary of the mind, clouds our awareness. And so Augustine prays:

‘The house of my soul [mind] is too small to receive you. Let it be enlarged by you.’ (1)

What a wonderful prayer. Enlarge my mind. Bring me into the spaciousness of the heart, of awareness, to be aware of you flowing within me, flowing as me. The spiritual journey is not about acquiring anything. Quite the opposite. It is about becoming aware of and available to what has always been present.

A gentle work of freedom

As we meditate each day, gently returning our attention to our prayer word, to our breath, each time we notice we have become distracted, we are stepping out of the narrow, constricting world of compulsive thinking, to stand and meet our life from a more spacious, peaceful foothold.

We are not trying to manufacture an experience. We are not trying to force ourselves into a particular state. We are simply consenting to be led, moment by moment, breath by breath, into what the great Desert Father Evagrius called ‘the open country whose name is prayer.’ (2) 

What a beautiful description. Prayer is not another burden. Not another achievement. Not another thing to accomplish. It is an opening, a spaciousness, a gentle work of freedom, a place where we discover that we are not our thoughts or feelings, but where they happen. We are the spacious, peaceful awareness where they arise and depart.

In meditation, we discover that we are more than our fears, more than our anxieties, infinitely more than the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

I like to think that this is what the psalmist discovered. God had not simply rescued him from danger, but had brought him into a new way of being. They were led into the spacious place of the enlarged mind, to the awareness which is the heart of mind, to the open country whose name is prayer.

Wisdom from St. Isaac the Syrian

But the Christian revelation never stops there. The ‘spacious place’ is not simply a private experience. The enlarged mind leads to the merciful heart.

Saint Isaac the Syrian asks what happens when a heart is transformed by the love of God. His answer is simple and profound. It becomes a ‘merciful heart,’ spacious enough to embrace the whole of creation. The merciful heart, he says, burns with love ‘for every human being…for every created thing.’ (3)

Becoming the likeness of Love itself

‘You have set my feet in a spacious place,’ sang the psalmist. May God enlarge our minds and bring us into the spaciousness of awareness, of the merciful heart.

The heart wide enough to welcome who we truly are.

The heart wide enough to embrace all creation.

The heart which has become the likeness of God – the likeness of Love itself.