Faith: Light Seen by Heart

“… faith is the opening of an inward eye, the eye of the heart, to be filled with the presence of Divine light” 

 Thomas Merton is simply a treasure, speaking profoundly to timeless questions and now particularly into the immediate moment with our nation endangered by hatred. This season, the next few days especially, cry for compassion toward persons caught, unconsciously or not, in the terrible web of hate. Merton points out how our perception of haters also usually reflects darkness in the beholder. 

 “It is not only our hatred of others that is dangerous but also and above all our hatred of ourselves: particularly that hatred of ourselves which is too deep and too powerful to be consciously faced. For it is this which makes us see our evil in others and unable to see it in ourselves” (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 112). 

     Cleaning the mirror and “seeing into the mystery at the heart of life," then, marks an essential work of a person who hopes to pray, to contemplate, to draw nearer to the Divine. What a time this is! 

      I was drawn to his New Seeds of Contemplation because Richard Rohr and others reference it as a primary text in discerning the “False Self” and the “True Self.” The book has so many gems. Today I’m touched by his teaching on the nature of faith. Faith needed, perhaps most of all, in a darkened time. 

“Too often our notion of faith is falsified by our emphasis on the statements about God which faith believes, and by our forgetfulness of the fact that faith is a communion with God’s own light and truth… But, above all, faith is the opening of an inward eye, the eye of the heart, to be filled with the presence of Divine light” (pp. 128, 130, New Seeds of Contemplation). 

     It’s a good season to listen for, to look for, and to soak up the special light, so manifest in the yellows of leaves, in the spaces created by fallen leaves, by the break in clouds and in the glistening given by stormy skies.

The Secret in Woodlands

“the silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds over all the world” (from Merton’s Dancing in the Waters of Life, quoted on p. 23 in Thomas Merton, Writings on Nature: When the Trees Say Nothing, edited by Kathleen Deignan, Sorin Books, 2003).

     I’m absorbed further into Merton’s vision in a morning like today (shown above, looking toward the sunrise amid the woods below our home; and again, just below, viewed over our mailbox, westward into the beyond).  

     In a few moments, I’ll walk among baby chestnut oaks and other white and red oaks, too young to name. I’ll feel within a joy coming up because these sprouts are reclaiming spaces where they’ve been missed, after being crowded out by invasive vines, and worse, by human insensitivity, greed. . .  Their absence marks a terrible, unfortunate alienation from the secret heart.

      A couple of years ago, I talked about this God-given project that had been offered fifteen-years earlier when we moved to this property. Parts of the land could even have hidden Sleeping Beauty’s castle due to the tangled thicket of invasive undergrowth that had gradually taken over after the native forest had been cut. Somehow, even then, I was called into reclamation and began building awareness of how these

semi-conscious engagements with nature sustained me during the time from leaving the family farm for college in 1965 for forty years until the move from D.C. suburbs to our West Virginia 4.5 acre sanctuary. By 2005, my being was pretty desperate for the solace of nature, and my consciousness had awakened enough to push for significant and difficult commitments to the natural world. 

         Our new homeland already featured several organic gardens, but it also presented woodlands that were infested with thickets of invasive plants choking out the native oaks and maples. As we stewarded these grounds, nature more than equivocated by tending our souls.

     Looking back at “Transforming Sanctuary of Nature,” (the blog of Oct 28, 2018), I see how the work of clearing underbrush was complemented by the library on sacred texts. A slow articulation was coming forward toward and into the secret:

Almost certainly, the particular lines from Rumi struck me because of the reading I’d been doing in Nasr’s Religion and the Order of Nature. As mentioned in the “The World Turning Gold,” Nasr’s text widens the window of nature as it informs the way humans have been cut off from feeling God’s presence in nature. Although I have long sensed my need to commune in the natural world, I’d been veiled from opening my heart to the treasure. Imagine the revelation made increasingly possible when we enter the holy place trusting that it’s “a living creature with soul and intellect.” 

Nicholson’s elaboration in the commentary focuses on attaining knowledge of God (p. 83) and adds “the physical heart has an immaterial soul (jani rubani), which, when purified and illumined by love, develops another heart, viz. the spiritual organ that perceives the Unseen.”

      Kathleen Deignan notes an interesting moment in Thomas Merton’s experience in the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in northern Kentucky that developed about ten years after he entered there:

“But in 1951 in response to Merton’s request for greater solitude, Abbot Dom James nominated him ‘forester’ which entailed restoring the woodlands that had been stripped a decade earlier. The job radicalized his experience of solitude, no longer perceived as privacy for intellectual pursuits, but an opportunity for embodied engagement with a whole community of wisdom in silent participation in the vitality of living things.” (p. 31)

Com-posing Comm-Union

 

8:05:52AM, October 14, 2020

     Imagine being drawn by the invitation of Truth into the composing of beauty in nature. It’s an open doorway any moment to play with and into recognition from the inner eye that joys as the form comes into focus, into being, the liminal reality that evinces invisible lines of universal connection, that lifts off the physical plane into the radiance of pure light. This participation in the Divine nurtures the soul; without this devotion, without dedicating creative belief and love, the inner spirit languishes.This ever-present Eternity awaits even when veiled by impurities ashen over the heart.

     About the time of my conception, three-quarters of a century ago, Aldous Huxley called it

“… the one divine Reality substantial to the material world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfil certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit” (The Perennial Philosophy, p. viii).

Beauty and Brokenness

At least twice I noticed these dried-up flowers, planned to take them out, and forgot. Old age, memory slip? Or a subtle gift? Getting old pushes further into beauty, loving 

“in a certain sense, between all living things. Life is attracted to life. Beauty is attracted to both beauty and brokenness—which is a good description of all that lives./ Life is fragmented and finite and yet part of a larger and attractive whole. We long to be with this wholeness” (Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace, p. 33). 

This third time noticing the flowers, not just dried-up, but broken-beauty breaks through shuttered sight. Having read the passage and taken it in, I'm taken out, camera in hand, as an opening allows a certain further sense, a searching, even longing, toward the sense of beautiful brokenness, a window for wholeness--

Transformation of Consciousness

“…now it is just a matter of time till false power falls apart.” As I’m reading the final chapters of Richard Rohr’s The Universal Christ, the possibility of transformed consciousness, like the beauty of butterflies emergent from the dark cocoon, offers a ray of hope in this time darkened by blind hate, these dark nights when brothers and sisters are veiled by superficial differences from celebrating our connection, from living each moment knowing the essence that unites all of God’s creation. If only Love were to break through. Rohr tells of the transformation beyond the blinders of selfishness, fear, and oppression.

“I have witnessed much of this evolution of consciousness in my own small lifetime—toward nonviolence, inclusivity, mysticism, and ever more selfless love, as well as more correct naming of the shadow side of things. This is the gradual ‘second coming of Christ.’ Our present highly partisan politics, angry culture wars, and circling of the wagons around white privilege are just the final gasps of the old, dying paradigm.” (p. 198)

Transformation may be, perhaps always is, hard. Scary. The demanding tone comes through the spiritual teaching: “Die before you die.” 

The creature that only knew caterpillar crawling unbelievably floats on angel wings. 

Old consciousness has to surrender to knowings that had been impossible. Apparent opposites can be contained. “The people who hold the contradictions and resolve them in themselves are the saviors of the world. They are the only real agents of transformation, reconciliation, and newness” (Rohr, p. 148). 

Almost impossible, and it would be if one had to do it alone. But the good news is that the Way is Love and Love is never alone. This transformed consciousness unites with the Creator in the creation. The Way demands that we love, that we love more deeply. Passion.

“In the practical order of life, if we have never loved deeply or suffered deeply, we are unable to understand spiritual things at any depth. . . They are [God’s] primary tools for human transformation.” (p. 207)

Recognition on the Pathway

Friendship with morning sun & hummingbirds, May 13, 2020

“Jesus loves me. This I know. For the Bible tells me so.” Good old Vacation Bible School children’s song. And then there’s growing up. Getting old. And knowledge from any book, from any preacher, from any external source, sometimes just isn’t enough.

Because humans thirst for truth. It’s the divine implant calling, like a tracking device, that burns through books and that cries for direct personal experience. Even when it hurts. For holy fire purifies. Still unsatisfied, and broken-hearted as well, the yearning yet insistently pulls, thank God, further into the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” This, the trail, the trial, of living in mystery, ever searching.

A vital key to tracking the unseen can be found in the familiar notion of recognition. It’s that thrilling and unsettling feel when a person or place seems both strange and also previously known, a sort of deja vu. William Chittick invites us to go further into the word: “re-cognize”:

“that is, to come once again to see what one already knows. . . recognition is discovered within oneself, but learning is acquired from outside…One comes to see face-to-face what was only known by hearsay and following authority.”

And he connects this with the classic line, replacing “knows” with “recognizes”: “He who recognizes himself (or “his soul”) recognizes his Lord.” [Translator’s Introduction, Unveiling of the Mysteries, Fons Vitae, 2015, p. xi.]

Sufis, as well as other trackers on the spiritual pathway, say bewilderment (of a certain sort) doesn’t mean a person is lost, but instead signals higher reaches on the way toward the divine. “Bewilderment is beyond all the stations” writes Sam’ani in Repose of the Spirits in “his chapter on the divine name wali, the Friend” (translated by William Chittick, Divine Love, pp. 293-4).

In order to re-cognize, perhaps it’s necessary to get befuddled and to let go of indoctrination, and to surrender flat levels of knowing, over and again, in order to climb higher, especially in relation to the greatest guide. For love is the great mystery, not meant to be defined, “inexplicable” concludes Chittick: “Anyone can be a lover, but no one can explain love” (p. 293). 

That’s comforting. Yes it is—for someone who admits the truth of bewilderment about it—especially when it comes to approaching God. And recognize that love, most especially Divine Love, pulls past the reaches of human knowledge and opens a door, one of those hidden in plain sight.  Like the one just mentioned above, it’s so easy to wander past, barely—if at all—aware it’s been missed. Perhaps it doesn’t look big enough or bright enough when up against the great name of Love. 

It’s simply friendship. It’s an experience that’s still hard to nail down in words, but perhaps it’s more comfortable in the sense of knowing where it is, when it happens, how it feels. And it’s easier to feel sure we’ve offered friendship and can still return to the glow of it.

And yet, to presume friendship with God? Still a bit scary. But the glow we know of human friendship radiates in the God-given sunshine after rain, and in the rain, too. Even the thunderstorm, particularly having witnessed rainbows and well-watered flowers. Trees. 

Chittick adds Maybudi to Sam’ani:

“How could the traveler not be delighted that friendship is the nearest way station to the Protector? The tree that produces only the fruit of joy is friendship, the soil that grows nothing but the flowers of intimacy is friendship, the cloud that rains nothing but light is friendship, the drink whose poison turns into honey is friendship, the road whose dust is musk and ambergris is friendship… Friendship’s field has the width of the heart, and the kingdom of paradise is one branch of friendship’s tree. Those who drink friendship’s wine are promised vision.” (Divine Love, p. 298) 

Raindrops, oak leaves, spring flowers: re-cognizing divine friendship

God, First and Last

The pileated woodpecker backlit in morning sun blazes with remembrance of the majesty of God. All manifestations, even unto Paradise, surrender before the Transcendent. In the chapter on “The Fall of Adam” (Sufism, pp. 141-177), William Chittick translates portions of The Refreshment of the Spirits by Ahmad Sam’ani (d. 1140). Adam is revealed as the paradigm for choosing God above all else:

“‘Adam’s unharnessed aspiration placed him like a sultan on the horse of love. He took the arrow of solitude from the quiver of detachment and stretched the bow to its limit. He shot the beautiful peacock of paradise, which was strutting in the garden of the Abode. He knew that this was the path of the detached, the work of those with high aspiration, the court of those brought near to God. Time, space, entities, traces, vestiges, shapes, existent things, and objects of knowledge must be erased completely from in front of you. If any of these clings to your skirt, the name of freedom will not stick to you. As long as the name free does not sit on you, you can never be a true servant of God.’” (Sufism, p. 155; Chittick translating Sam’ani’s Refreshment of the Spirits, p. 120)

In this chapter, Chittick articulates the gift of Adam, especially in leading us toward the secret of Love and into grasping the essential value of free choice.

“If human beings are to aspire to God, they need to be able to differentiate between God and all else. The key to human love and perfection is a discerning heart, one that sees God in the midst of the confusing multiplicity of creation. Adam provides the model for lovers.” (Sufism, p. 156)

Adam disobeyed God at God’s instigation, because God knew that without disobedience Adam would not realize the attributes of distance that allow him to become a lover. The essence of love is yearning and heartache. ” (Sufism, p. 152-3)