The Whole World

Today looking east

In the opening pages of The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology, Douglas Christie quotes the source of the title: 

When the mind has put off the old self and shall put on the one born of grace, then it will see its own state in the time of prayer resembling sapphire or the color of heaven; this state scripture calls the place of God that was seen by the elders on Mount Sinai. --Evagrius of Pontus 

This compelling book culminated for me, fittingly, in the closing chapter with its focus on “Practicing Paradise.” The capacity to revision paradise developed through a recurring theme related to the ecstatic, which connects with those special moments in the mystical journey and yet must not be cut off from everyday experience in nature. 

… we come to know ourselves in relation to the living world. Ecstasy begets intimacy, an intimate knowledge that can come to us only through relinquishment of a narrow, bounded self and an openness to an ever-emerging sense of participation in a larger whole. Attention to these moments when such ecstatic expansion occurs can quicken and deepen one’s sensitivity to the world, can open one to the possibility of a continuous exchange, an ever-more encompassing exchange. (p. 235) 

 We must honor and suffer our deep inner truth while also feeling and engaging our interconnectedness with the whole world, with all people and the rest of creation. Thoreau and Merton are frequently referenced for illustration and modeling. Considerable attention is also given to Denise Levertov, Czeslaw Milosz, Simone Weil, and others to show the way while leaving space for the necessary individual design and fit. 

      While the up-side of the path brightens the way, the essential passage through darkness must not be diminished. The next to last chapter “Kenosis: Empty, Emptied” attends significantly to affliction. “Mysticism must rest on crystal-clear honesty, can only come after things have been stripped down to their naked reality” (p. 283, quoting Etty Hillesum). Extending from the work of Simone Weil, Christie asserts “Healing and renewal and hope can issue forth from such contemplative practice; but the practice itself cannot be predicated upon expectation of them. One is called to remain empty, open, alert, always attentive to the presence of the other, particularly the suffering other” (p. 287). 

      With this inclusive acceptance of the whole, both the light and the dark, Paradise shifts to a texture that may be more complex and yet more real, perhaps more accessible. After all, didn’t the Garden of Eden include the serpent as well as the apple, nakedness as well as fig leaves, the self encountering the Other. The closing pages of The Blue Sapphire of the Mind encourage us to constitute a restructuring of paradise that empowers resistance to the destruction of our healthy space for living. 

It seems increasingly clear that we need the language of paradise to help us feel and understand the enormity of what we have lost and what we might yet recover. Which is why the personal accounts of engagement with paradise—lost, broken, renewed—remain so important to the larger work of healing the world (p. 348).

Today looking north