For many years nature has provided me with metaphors of inspiration and encouragement regarding the spiritual life. None more profoundly than a recent trip to the confluence where the Des Moines river enters the great Mississippi. I’ve long had a fascination with how one flowing stream merges with another. When I’ve paused by the confluence of Walnut Creek with the Des Moines, something about that union has spoken to me but I‘ve not had words for it, not until I finally found the Des Moines pouring into the Mississippi.
I deliberately use the word “finally.” On my annual retreat this year, I was relatively close in distance to the merger of these two rivers. One morning I set out with eager anticipation to make the two hour trek, expecting to see a large sign, perhaps a lovely park where this joining occurred. Once I arrived at the river town, I drove around, around, and around, determined to find the exact place of confluence. But I could not. Recalling the joke about Moses taking forty years to get to the promised land because he wouldn’t ask for directions, I finally stopped by a man mowing his lawn to inquire “where” I could locate the confluence. To my dismay he said “You can’t get to it.” But he offered a consolation, giving directions for where I could cross a bridge over the Des Moines and view the confluence from there.
I found the bridge, drove across, parked the car. From that spot the meeting of rivers was about 3/4 block away with a railroad trestle midway spanning the river. Through the trestle’s open spaces I could actually see where both rivers merged, even though I was not as close as I’d hoped. I stood there agape at how wide the Des Moines grows as she travels, awed by the sublime, powerful assimilation as she enters the Mississippi’s waters.
Standing there, I felt my inner life connected to the outer one. I marveled at how the Des Moines’ long journey of 525 miles from southern Minnesota through Iowa ends by being daily absorbed in a much greater stream of water. I sensed an urgency for the sea in that flow, an energy moving and encouraging her to course onward in hopes of reaching that destination. The river’s impetus to reach the greater waters is similar to the inner longing within us, as expressed by St. Augustine’s—”our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” As the Des Moines constantly enters into a vaster realm, so with our spiritual journey. We continually release and join our love with the great River of Love. And just as I could not be at the exact point of the rivers’ confluence, only rarely do we experience the felt awareness of union when our hearts are joined with the Holy One’s heart.
The letting go of one river into a larger body of water surely fits the paradox Jesus taught: For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Luke9:24) This ancient yet ever-relevant teaching prompts us to release our love into a Love greater than our own. Through unselfish deeds and a willingness to live as a person of integrity, we join our personal love to the flowing stream of the Holy One. And, like a river joining another river, this isn’t a one time event, but a daily, hourly, moment-by-moment movement, urged onward by that deep longing for spiritual merging.
As we go forth into the month of September, let us be like a traveling river willing to merge our personal love with the great flowing river of Divine Love.
Abundant peace,
Joyce Rupp
