Tracking the Holy

May 4, ~6AM

 Notes from May 4 ~2AM: This post I write incomplete—realizing all is.  Maybe in resignation about a draft that began a week ago and is still refusing to come to closure. It began this way:

A friend asks, “What do you do on Sunday?”

What a wonderful question! For Sundays come first and often forefront, anticipating the sacred. And yet, what if each moment of all days should be respected and searched for the Holy? Consider the spirit of “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2) and the model of Jesus who penetrates past the surface of religion, challenging the no-work command in order to do healing as if that is the true way to keep the Sabbath holy (Luke 6). Then an inquiry into Sunday might offer guidance for every day. 

Notes, 9AM, May 4: But I should have realized (given previous forays into sacred ground) that going there enters a realm out of control. Wandering and getting lost has more chance than not. And so, the maze has led into a shift in my reading that swirled into Orpheus (Walter A. Strauss, Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature). Very interesting but more (and more serious) wandering… a force to simply accept (surrender to) the “gift” of fragments.

poppies

Anyway, all this muddle has me wondering about directions. When Lauren visited in January, she commented about how much her dad got confused when driving (or walking). Even for places we’d been six or eight times in the past few days, I’d turn the wrong way. 

And this brings back memories from much longer ago, from when I worked as a chain-carrier for my surveyor dad (and a few times for his father, Lee). I remember Dad’s exasperation in redirecting me north after I’d taken out east or southwest. But he’d only told me “Go north” and hadn’t pointed the way. The kind of inner compass that just knows cardinal directions must’ve been left out of my birthright. 

And yet the absence of that kind of direction-knowing might be a guidance itself. It only took about 50 years for me to find, to accept, and to appreciate the treasure of a different sort of resonance. Persons may be given a capacity with a needle that hones in, not on magnetic north, but instead on giving guidance toward the sacred. Yet to read this directional guide seems to require dedicated development and consistent re-calibration.

     And so, my draft about “What do you do on Sunday?” was like a zephyr going after the Holy. You know, “Keep the Sabbath holy!” I know. I know. Sunday isn’t the Sabbath. And yet, it is. Rule 1: The “holy" moves out beyond literalism. 

Ah, Zephyr-land! Uncle Perry lived there: Zephyr, Texas, pop. 750 when we visited in the 50s, down to 198 over the next 20-30 years (according to Google). Uncle Perry: not an easy fit with the “real world.” Is anyone really? Maybe we’re just fashioned for another realm, and all this trying to fit in, to make it, to succeed!!!—foolishness. There’s a Sunday-thought for us, and it’s nothing new. Rule #2. Align to the true self, the unique, and yet paradoxically One.

The draft then meandered off into the theme of “resonance” but we’ll save that for next time…

one Sunday