Flavors of Devotion?

Is it feasible to have flavors of devotion? Different manifestations or expressions of what some call this ‘heart’ of the path, even as each ‘flavor’ connotes the singular phenomenon (we name with the word) devotion? My first response to this is “Of course. There will be as many flavors of devotion as there are persons who receive it.” As physicists identify light to be both particle and wave, so devotion would have to have pointed flavor and continuous flow. But my second wrestling comes close on the heels of the facile first. When something manifests with infinite diversity, why do we try to name it with a unified whole of a referent or word? Of course, the pugnacious of us will then say, “Isn’t God infinitely manifest and yet One?” I’m not being pugnacious here, however. Just ponderous and curious.

In my own awareness of it, the sensation of devotion does overwhelm categories even as it is inexplicably intimate, unique. It therefore seems to encourage differentiation from any description one offers while it continuously invites you into practice, into the lived worlds of real people.  If I think of the different ‘fields’ of devotion operative in my life, there are distinctive ‘signatures’ to each. I yet recognize some similarity in each that encourages me to put them all within my reflections on devotion. It would be a truism to say that that similarity is ‘me,’ because of course that’s the case. But some relationships with the ‘me’ in my life teach me about devotion while others do not seem to (yet).  So what is the similarity yet differentiation at play here?

One obvious similarity is that those within the sensations of devotion come into my mental awareness and practice regularly. In a regular sitting practice—which, for me, is best described by ‘centering prayer’ or a surrender-practice within a strand of ‘calm abiding’—images or awareness of their presence arises, and these are received as gift before being released with a smile. Or I catch myself thinking of them in random moments throughout a day completely unrelated to them or shared activities. There is an embodied or felt-connection of thanksgiving for them, for my knowing them, for the ways in which they live into the world. In this way, those with whom I share a sense of devotion create a web-of-awareness within my lived experience, whether I have any contact with them in near past, conscious present, or anticipated future. When they do come into my practice, I guess I practice a version of “holding persons ‘in the Light’” or devoting energies in their name outward for good in the world.  I’ve never been one for intercessory prayer but this kind of awareness-in-practice is as close as I can get to the Christianized meaning of that phrase. When there is no actually shared practice with them, or awareness of them does not arise in my own practice, then the sensations of devotion do seem to lessen. The connection between awareness and practice therefore seems significant to ‘flavor’ and ‘continuity.’

Yet the relationship between devotion and practice is a tricky thing. I used to think that as devotion lessened, then something was wrong with the practice or there was infidelity at play with the relationship. Overwhelming confirmation has come that this is not the case at all. Sometimes it’s the conclusion of the relationship that sparks devotion outward in new ways. We never create our relationships anyway, so how can one of us be wholly responsible for when relationships change? Yet there is a connection between devotion and practice that somehow facilitates both the point-sensations and the continuity of flow within webs of relationship. Each of us is responsible to practice, to open to the day’s gifts (whatever they may be), and surrender felt-connections as tenuous-longlived gifts of the day.

So be it. For today, anyway.