Presence Alone and With

Dreams often transgress into the past as if a forty-year career hasn’t properly ended, even when final grades were done a half-decade ago. A few days ago, the night’s visitation ghosted students who were more concerned with getting points than with understanding. Will we ever learn?  

    The art of teaching inspires the quest into the inarticulate, not the adulation of dead letters. Love glides above, beyond the best of poems. Modeling has a place but truth lives in continual creation.

    

     Education, at essence, invites experience of wonder, nurtures longing for not-knowing, frees the drive further into mystery where the personally unique swirls into Union. 

     A trace or savoring of such might be felt as resonance; maybe it’s a subtle tone of love—the sense of entering a harmony, a tension that joys in the fragrance of peace. 

    In this way, my reading has recently delighted in the terrain of Teilhard de Chardin. For example, 

“When he has pursued to the end the vocation contained in all sense-perception—when his eyes have once become accustomed to the Light invisible in which both the periphery of beings and their centre are bathed—then the seer perceives that he is immersed in a universal Milieu, higher than that which contains the restlessness of ordinary, sensibly apprehended, life: a Milieu that knows no change, immune to the surge of superficial vicissitudes—a homogeneous Milieu in which contrasts and differences are toned down. As yet, he can say nothing of this diffuse Reality except that it exists, that it is enveloping and that in a mysterious way it is beatifying. It is enough for him, however, to have glimpsed its serene and luminous folds. Nothing henceforth can shake his determination to move for ever into its embrace and to find his happiness in there becoming ever more lost.” [p. 120, Writings in Time of War]

 

Softer Love, Subtle Tone

Graying skies with yellow-browned leaves, many down, allow the softer love of shadows, subtle tonalities, layers above common horizons, slowing, looking long, erasing space and time. 

“There is an unbearable and unstoppable energy at the heart of the cosmos that is relentless, despite billions of years of cosmic life. This yearning for wholeness is integral to the unfinished process of evolution because it is an ultimate wholeness that exceeds the human grasp. God is the unbearable wholeness of being, the unrelenting dynamism of love, pushing through the limits of matter to become God at the heart of this evolutionary universe. Divine love evolves the universe as it leans into an unknown future.” Ilia Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, p. 202. 

God/Love: Known Mystery

God has always held as Mystery while Love’s masquerade as sure, known, embraced slips away. Yet change often trues and now the two more converge. Perhaps an evolving consciousness signals as the most reliable marker on the pathway. Reassurance to continue on comes with the edge of knowing and not through the devil-curse of dead-certainty. 

“Evolution is not only the universe coming to be but it is God who is coming to be insofar as God arises with the development of consciousness.” [fn p. 72, Delio, Unbearable Wholeness]

   My current support and guide for this trapeze-trail comes from Ilia Delio’s The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution and the Power of Love. The text distills, interprets, and blends Teilhard de Chardin, Raimon Panikkar, Moltman along with Tillich and  others in exploring this inexplicable wonder. For example:

“God loves the world with the very same love which God is. God is not divine substance governing creation but the radical subject of everything that exists, the depth and wholeness of nature itself that reveals itself in its hiddenness. God’s love fills up each being as ‘this’ (and not ‘that’), but the limits of any being cannot contain God; thus, the excess of God’s love spills over as ‘transcendence,’ more than any being can grasp. Transcendence is the fecundity of love and the ‘yearning’ dimension of everything that exists.” [p. 71]

   While quantum physics quakes the foundations of space/time craved by fundamentalism, the shaky feeling found in venturing into sacred ground, like the sense of “participation mystique,” may be eased. The invitation is to know love that knows and loves beyond the hard boundaries of physical touch and sight.

“The divine mystery is the ultimate AM of everything. God is not the ontologically distinct Being who empowers created beings but the very dimension of created being by which being transcends itself toward greater relationality, wholeness, and depth… God is the unlimited depth of love of all that is, a love that overflows into new life.” (pp. 66-67)

 

A Stream of Transformation

For days now, even weeks, falling leaves swirl about, and they’re overlaying memories of watching the beautiful maple and oak trees in autumns past. While the leaves were beautiful, my feelings were not so pleasant, bittersweet, at best. So I’ve been anticipating that poignancy…yet it’s not rising up. This season stirs differently; instead of tinged with sadness, the flow seems to move into a stream of transformation. More like feeling into the unknown…not necessarily unpleasant. Leaves lightly dance—as if death is not to dread, as if the mystery beyond has not ending at heart, but a penetrating continuity.

   Perhaps the different view owes partly to recent readings: Towards Mystical Union by Julienne McLean, Spiritual Pilgrims by John Welch, and Androgyny by June Singer. Important material has been drawn especially from The Interior Castle of Saint Teresa of Avila, also from the work of C.G. Jung, particularly his “Stages of Life” (from CW8, pp. 387-403). Old age allows a changing experience with falling leaves, but it doesn’t force it. 

          What do we make of dying and the possibility of what follows? Jung advises us “to discover in death a goal towards which one can strive, and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose. . . it would therefore be desirable to think of death as only a transition, as part of a life process whose extent and duration are beyond our knowledge” [p. 402; para 792].

   Some friend posted a helpful excerpt from John O’Donohue:

"The dead are not distant or absent. They are alongside us. When we lose someone to death, we lose their physical image and presence, they slip out of visible form into invisible presence. This alteration of form is the reason we cannot see the dead. But because we cannot see them does not mean that they are not there. Transfigured into eternal form, the dead cannot reverse the journey and even for one second re-enter their old form to linger with us a while. Though they cannot reappear, they continue to be near us and part of the healing of grief is the refinement of our hearts whereby we come to sense their loving nearness. When we ourselves enter the eternal world and come to see our lives on earth in full view, we may be surprised at the immense assistance and support with which our departed loved ones have accompanied every moment of our lives. In their new, transfigured presence their compassion, understanding and love take on a divine depth, enabling them to become secret angels guiding and sheltering the unfolding of our destiny.” [from Beauty: The Invisible Embrace] 

 

   Another posting came from the work of Anaïs Nin :

“I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.”  (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955)

 

   Love is, of course, the Way. While it may be an “ever-fixed mark,” love also offers ever deepening. My feeling for these trees, and the presence as well as absence of their leaves. Their presence through the seasons of life deepens. The gift of photography, like Anaïs Nin’s art, follows their falling, like O’Donohue’s love taking on a divine depth, and guides us on beyond our knowledge.

Love in Falling

A gray, drizzly sort of day, soft falling of yellow-brown leaves; perfect—perhaps—for drifting together tumbleweed thoughts, mellowed reflections, wonderments that’ve been just hanging on, waiting to be gathered together, especially these: 

      the persistent call “die-before-you-die; 

        also, the hard discernment between false self and true self;

          and reflections on dreams that wander, searching the way home. 

   Life’s journey has sifted through the hourglass of truth: being mesmerized and then unmasking teachers, preachers, prophets… Richard Rohr’s meditation this week focused on “the prophetic task of integrating our individual and collective memories.”

 

 “It takes a prophet of sorts, one who sees clearly, one who has traveled the highway before, one who remembers everything, to guide us beyond our blocked, selective, and partial remembering…

   Memory is very often the key to understanding. Memory integrates, reconciles, and puts the individual members into perspective as a part of the whole. For us to recognize what God is doing and therefore who God is, we must pray like Paul “that your love may more and more abound, both in understanding and wealth of experience” (Philippians 1:9).

   Our remembrance that God has remembered us will be the highway into the future, the straight path of the Lord promised by John the Baptizer [see Luke 3:3–6]. Where there is no memory, there will be no pain, but neither will there be hope. Memory is the basis of both the pain and the rejoicing. We need to re-member both of them; it seems that we cannot have one without the other. Do not be too quick to “heal all of those memories,” unless that means also feeling them deeply and taking them all into our salvation history. God seems to be calling us to suffer the whole of reality, to remember the good along with the bad. Perhaps that is the course of the journey toward new sight and new hope. Memory creates a readiness for salvation, an emptiness to receive love, and a fullness to enjoy it."

   Recall Rilke’s poignant image of circles around the ancient tower. Deep breath for not knowing which spiral will be the last. 

“I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”   

   Finding a spiritual guide seems essential—but also to let go, falling like these autumn leaves through bewilderment…suffering…unknowing… This is so eloquently expressed by Saint Teresa of Avila in “Interior Castle.”

I have sometimes been terribly oppressed by this turmoil of thoughts and it is only just over four years ago that I came to understand by experience that thought (or, to put it more clearly, imagination) is not the same thing as understanding. I asked a learned man about this and he said I was right, which gave me no small satisfaction. For, as the understanding is one of the faculties of the soul, I found it very hard to see why it was sometimes so timid; whereas thoughts, as a rule, fly so fast that only God can restrain them; which He does by uniting us in such a way that we seem in some sense to be loosed from this body. It exasperated me to see the faculties of the soul, as I thought, occupied with God and recollected in Him, and the thought, on the other hand, confused and excited. 

O Lord, do Thou remember how much we have to suffer on this road through lack of knowledge! The worst of it is that, as we do not realize we need to know more when we think about Thee, we cannot ask those who know; indeed we have not even any idea what there is for us to ask them. So we suffer terrible trials because we do not understand ourselves; and we worry over what is not bad at all, but good, and think it very wrong. Hence proceed the afflictions of many people who practise prayer, and their complaints of interior trials—especially if they are unlearned people—so that they become melancholy, and their health declines, and they even abandon prayer altogether, because they fail to realize that there is an interior world close at hand. Just as we cannot stop the movement of the heavens, revolving as they do with such speed, so we cannot restrain our thought. And then we send all the faculties of the soul after it, thinking we are lost, and have misused the time that we are spending in the presence of God. Yet the soul may perhaps be wholly united with Him in the Mansions very near His presence, while thought remains in the outskirts of the castle, suffering the assaults of a thousand wild and venomous creatures and from this suffering winning merit. So this must not upset us, and we must not abandon the struggle, as the devil tries to make us do. Most of these trials and times of unrest come from the fact that we do not understand ourselves.  [Saint Teresa of Avila. Interior Castle (Dover Thrift Editions) (pp. 49-50). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition]

   Sometimes after benefiting from external guides, the journey moves into exploring the authority of deep personal experience, particularly times of suffering; but/and then this too has to be let go.

“The experience of God’s love must make room for God alone.

   For that experience is not God and erects a screen between the soul and God’s naked Presence. The last traces of the ‘witness,’ the ‘spectator,’ the self-referential human ‘I’ are now dying, being annihilated and utterly transformed, in order for the splendour of the resurrected and transfigured Christ and the glory of His Light and Divine Love to be revealed.” [p. 257, McLean's Towards Mystical Union]

   As just illustrated, this week’s guidance has come from reading Julienne McLean’s Towards Mystical Union, “a modern commentary on the mystical text ‘The Interior Castle’ by St Teresa of Avila” and in reading directly from St. Teresa’s “Interior Castle”... and from the glory of autumn.

   Some experiences best age in memory…reflected upon. Tempered.  Re membered

In Memoriam. Daniel Alan VanderWerf Stanaland

Daniel, Seattle ferry, February 2020

In Memoriam. Daniel Alan VanderWerf Stanaland. July 1, 1982 - January 29, 2023

     Daniel made his transition from his home in Seattle after complications related to a variety of health issues. Arrangements for burial have been made with The Meadow Natural Burial Ground, Ferndale, WA.

Photo from Meadows website

     Many wonderful memories remain especially related to Daniel’s lifelong explorations in cyberspace and his adventurous engagements with computers. Following graduation from James Madison University in 2005 with a degree in computer science, Daniel was employed as a computer engineer with positions in Rockville, MD, Winchester, VA, and Seattle, WA. On a recent resume, he self-described as: “Generalist IT Engineer adept in a wide variety of subfields, including test engineering, networking, technical writing, troubleshooting, and programming. Career expertise includes tiger team specialization, large-scale system integration, and IV&V.”  

     In addition to his professional career, Daniel generously offered family and friends cutting-edge advice related to computer issues. He usually provided immediate solutions to teeth-gnashing problems for the less tech-savvy; and in the rare occasions that needed further trouble-shooting, he became a jedi on a mission. He’s going to be sorely missed.

Daniel and Mom in Seattle, February 2020

Midwinter Knows

It might be just the time to trod over the sodden leaf bed, attending to the fallen giants—to this stillness when so much seems asleep as if lifeless, still to sense the eternal presence that holds together, knowing only by heart the year-round spring blush, the summer lost-in-love, and always autumn’s passion, winter-truth.

Like the deep secret to human wholeness, holiness, plumbs center-wise, passing space/time to pre-eternity, remembering that profession of Trust. The poet's Tavern, drunken on unimaginable majesty, calls even for the subject looking foolish, risking too much, like these wood-kings apparently bared of their royal robes.

Yet protected in the deepest roots, a spark, never-to-be extinguished, the heart of Love flows from the Source, always returning.