This Snowflake Spring

Gift of Spring: This capacity to trust in life's renewal. Spring brings reassurance, perhaps most powerfully, through the defining integrity of the ephemeral. Like when our being thrills with the beauty shown in the litter of spent blooms, when we realize the rebirth that’s carried in pollen dust, carried home in spring’s spiraling winds, the spring-cast seeding soon enough to be washed into our mother earth. Throughout this, this full cycle, we all are held—if we but believe it—by our eternal home, the One.

This unique transcendent snowflake ever kissing, dissolving, transforming on the porous covering of heartbeat.

The “eternal-now” flows in this and every manifestation. It’s especially poignant in light’s fleeting snapshot: this Beauty. Each instance names the Name, variously called by all incarnations of  Presence: Nature, Peace, Joy…the one Love, of Whom we all belong.

It’s in this, in each instance, in the unique transcendent spring-snowflake ever kissing, dissolving, transforming on the porous covering of heartbeat.

The ever-changing appearance of form, the almost illusion of any separation from the Creator, in the resonant “Be!” the Real that’s present in every particle of breath, in every sign throughout creation. This.

This: The curious inhabiting of transient place, limitless space, ambivalent time, inarticulable knowing, the indwelling simultaneously moving here/there.

Gleaning from recent readings: 

In his chapter on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, James Olney hints at opportunity in the potentially disconcerting ephemerality of spring with its push toward the Source that gives the ultimate order:

“…experience per se, at least so far as humans are concerned, until given formal ordering and completion in the art work, until given the satisfaction of a new life in structural design, is void of meaning; and that design or pattern is the thing which, relating part to part and part to whole and implying an end in the beginning and middle, demonstrates significance in otherwise meaningless experience. But pattern is not discovered by us—mere details and parts, after all, of the whole design of life—-within experience. Instead we, insofar as we are artists, create the pattern and impose it on experience. Art formalizes experience; form implies an end and an intention, and so a meaning…” (Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography, p. 270) 

Richard Rohr in Hope Against Darkness offers a text of Spring, pointing to its wild exuberance:

“The word enthusiasm (en-theos in Greek) means ‘filled with God.’ I’m not encouraging mindless enthusiasm, but the enthusiasm that is based on intelligence and wisdom and that great gift of hope. Hope is a participation in the very life of God. This hope has nothing to do with circumstances or things going well. It can even thrive in adversity and trial. True faith, which always includes hope and love—is a predisposition to yes.” p. 52

 

From the concluding lines of al-Baqarah, a foundation for unity, for hope even in the disintegrating swirl of diverse blossoms that appear so fragile, that seem to be fading, losing the effervescence: 

“The Messenger believes in what was sent down to him from his Lord, as do the believers. Each believes in God, His angels, His Books, and His messengers. ‘We make no distinction between any of His messengers.’ And they say, ‘We hear and obey. Thy forgiveness, our Lord! And unto Thee is the journey’s end.’ God tasks no soul beyond its capacity. . .” (The Study Qur’an, Trans. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E.B. Lumbard, and Mohammed Rustom;  2: 235-236; pp. 124-125) 

Thisness. Just Now.

Photo taken Sunday, February 7, 2021

In the next to last page of her next to last chapter in The Body of God: An Ecological Theology, Sallie McFague eloquently synthesizes her work:

“In conclusion, let us briefly recall how each of these forms of the incarnation radicalizes divine immanence and transcendence. We suggested earlier that when we contemplate the wonders of evolutionary history in both its smallest and its greatest dimensions, through a microscope or a telescope, what we grasp is a concrete experience of awesomeness that comes as close as may be humanly possible to experiencing immanental transcendence or transcendent immanence Suddenly to see some aspect of creation naked, as it were, in its elemental beauty, its thereness and suchness, stripped of all conventional categories and names and uses, is an experience of transcendence and immanence inextricably joined. This possibility is before us in each and every piece and part of creation: it is the wonder at the world that young children have and that poets and artists retain It is to experience the ordinary as extraordinary. This is experiencing the world as God’s body, the ordinariness of all bodies contained within and empowered by the divine.” (p. 194)

McFague then opens her final chapter with lines from e.e. cummings including:

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any—lifted from the no

of all nothing—human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

 

Path-Maker Breaking Stones

"We make the road by walking," photo, January 9, 2021

The primary offering of a mystical text, in my experience, comes in the uniquely personal breaking open of the divine, often only as an elusive whiff at the edge of the articulate, a breeze that dares one to go beyond frozen thought patterns, to venture past traditions that violate the sanctity of freedom. And almost paradoxically, this freedom conjoins with unity, as Rabindranath Tagore told in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech: “We must discover the most profound unity, the spiritual unity between the different races…… He who sees all beings as himself, who realises all beings as himself, knows Truth.” This focuses the heart of Gitanjali, the force that Coleman Barks seeks to liberate and preserve.

        The beckoning pathway forms in glimpsing, in tasting the mystery that remains mysterious while also flavoring the everyday with a texture of life beyond. With this expectation, I looked forward to Fons Vitae’s publication of Coleman Barks’ “translation/version” of Tagore’s Gitanjali (Song Offerings). Having often found support in “making the road by walking” through Barks’ versions of Jalaluddin Rumi (which he fashioned from English translations by Arberry, Nicholson, and others), how would Barks enhance the vitality in Tagore’s own English translation from his native Bengali in the work which led to Tagore’s Nobel Prize award?

        In addition to the 103 songs comprising Gitanjali, Barks includes four additional poems from Tagore’s work, The Crescent Moon, and Barks also gives us a dozen pages of his own commentary and notes. I’d like an additional hundred pages of Barks’ commentary, and still I find that the concentrated material contributes by showing the involvement of W.B. Yates, Ezra Pound, and others as well as pointing to connections with Ghandi and Kabir.

        Barks begins, “Rabindranath Tagore is one of the great universal mystics.” Again, to me, the role of the mystic and thus of mystical text features access to the holy, so that the individual breathes the unique essence that purifies, inspires, and vitalizes, so that he or she moves forward on the pathway “made by walking” (e.g., Antonio Machado, in Campos de Castilla, Proverbios y Cantares, #29) and bridges “these daft twin brothers, life and death” (from Tagore’s #58, p. 76). Barks’ version, just cited, shows the light touch, which serves as a little wake-up invitation, in part through the addition of “daft” to Tagore’s English translation which reads: “the joy that sets the twin brothers, life and death, dancing over the wide world…” (p. 149 in Visva-Bharati/UBS Publication of Gitanjali). Barks also features, in the next line, “the storm” in a way that moves me differently from Tagore’s “tempest.” 

        It’s not that one translation/version is better than the other but that a force may be invoked to join the dance, to broker the mystical encounter. In Gitanjali, Tagore offers a departure from conventional religion. For example, number 11 opens:

“Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!

Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with all doors shut?

Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

   He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground

and where the path-maker is breaking stones…” 

     (p. 23 in Visva-Bharati/UBS)

Barks’ version goes:

“Give up this fumbling with beads, this chanting 

     in the dark, shut temple.

… A mason

     is breaking and laying stone for a path.”

      In number 102, Tagore, with beautiful respect for the individual’s responsibility and authority for path-making, tells of people who demand “Tell me all your meanings” and he responds, “‘Ah, who knows what they mean!’ They smile and go away in utter scorn./ And you sit there smiling.” (p. 253 in Visva-Bharati/UBS)

Barks’ version of the middle part of #102 offers, “A secret part of you flows out of me.” 

For me, the chance for a bit more of this secret is the offering from the publication of What Wants to Come Through Me Now. 

Paradox, Certainty, Suffering, and the All-Surpassing Omniscience (That is, Love)

August 24, 2020

     The year 2020 must go down as a great humbler. Perhaps this period of time, if viewed in the long landscape, reveals possibilities, particularly opportunities to inspire radical remakings. Reflecting off the craziness of the current political arena, we might channel this turbulence to transform meanings of crucial standpoints. Could the time be ripe for radical change in the prime movers among the complex of Power to Love? How might we engage creative chaos? What if we’ve been tangled in the old, old but failed, mythos of the hero? And what if this heroic sense of self (which necessarily generates blame as well as hubris) is incommensurate with our divine guidance? Can we risk surrender to the divine? How can a person let go of the struggle without falling into darkness?

     Perhaps the sense of what to do and what not to do requires a revolution in the feeling of certainty. The Good Books tell us that Knowing belongs to the Omniscient and thus reaches beyond our cognitive grasp (cf. Philippians 4:7, Peace surpasses understanding; Ephesians 3:19, Love surpasses knowledge). So why be surprised when the best we can reach of certainty comes in a sacred texture of bewilderment, being awed, surrendered.* 

The mark that someone knows that the Real’s knowledge encompasses his acts, states, and words is that quaking and dread becomes his watchword, and awe holds up the banner of rulership from his head to his toes. . . Adam was biting the fingers of wonder with the teeth of bewilderment: ‘What’s this? What happened?’” (William Chittick translating Sam’ani, The Repose of the Spirits, pp. 90,103 on al-‘Alim: the Knower)

October 8, 2020

Teachings of Sufism often return into the theme of mystical annihilation (fana) as one approaches the One (see, for example, Stoddard, Sufism, p. 64; Lings, What is Sufism? p. 78; Ernst, Shambhala Guide to Sufism, pp. 61, 115). An outgrown, dysfunctional sense of knowing needs release in order to birth wonder. Why bother about a feeling of ineptitude if we are swept into the ocean? 

      Richard Rohr’s meditation this week comforts me in the reminder that being heroic (my term, not his) is not the only way of acting responsibly in the presence of suffering. He uses the metaphor of a swollen river, sweeping folks off into its flow. The responsible action to today’s crisis comes not just in heroic activism that works toward systemic reform, but also and equally valuable are works of education/healing and those of hands-on help for persons in distress. In Mark Wallace’s writings, the caring attention extends to all of creation, trees to butterflies. 

“As the breath of God who animates all life, the Spirit becomes present in the spaces opened up between persons who risk themselves for the other. . . The Spirit is not a static entity but a potential modality of divine presence that becomes actual in the co-partnerships of persons with one another and other life forms” (pp. 10-11, Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the Renewal of Creation).

August 1, 2020

     Even so and always, the work zone flows from the interior and, of course, the Source. Blame and anger transform into constructive fire for healing and loving. The only effective agent, God.

*Previous blogs elaborating the theme of Bewilderment include:

August 18, 2019 When Bewilderment Tracks the Mystery

May 13, 2020 Recognition on the Pathway

September 7, 2018 Living with Bewilderment

August 24, 2019 Bewildered by God

November 16, 2019 Longing into Certainty

March 23, 2019 Rumi, Radical Love, & I/You (part A) 

August 18, 2018 Transcendent Power

February 10, 2018 Tracking on the Path of Attraction

December 16, 2017 “and He is with you”

November 14, 2017 Sure Good?

Eyes of Nature

Nov 19. frosty view just pre-dawn

Well, Duh! There’s a connection between the vision coming through the camera lens (edited with openness for revelations of Beauty) and with the selection of text moving past the eyes, particularly with submissiveness to the heart, and with all bowing to the spirit. 

Why be surprised when reading from sacred writings, from reflections of mystics, that the eyes are directed to light emanating from nature, to the lines that dance, shimmering between still forms.

Sam’ani says it: 

“O dervish, you will not see Him tomorrow until He sees Himself through you. By God the tremendous, if tomorrow you want to see, you must have pure vision. Pure vision is that He sees Himself through you.”...

     “Those who step into the road do not do so for any cause, only for love. . . Expecting compensation for obedient acts is a fatal poison. . . If you were to walk on this road for a thousand years and your obedience was not accepted and then it occurred to your mind that it should have been accepted, you will have been a status-seeker, not a road-seeker. You will not be a realizer in this road until you abandon your status with both the Real and the creatures.” 

(pp. 18, 29, emphasis in original; Ahmad Sam’ani, trans by William Chittick. The Repose of the Spirits: A Sufi Commentary on the Divine Names.)

fallen log fashioned into a viewing station

          Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation for today includes a quotation from Lisa Sharon Harper:

 “Evidence of the presence of the Kingdom of God is thick wherever and whenever people stand on the promise of God that there is more to this world—more to this life—than what we see. There is more than the getting over, getting by, or getting mine. There is more than the brokenness, the destruction, and the despair that threaten to wash over us like the waters of the deep. There is a vision of a world where God cuts through the chaos, where God speaks and there is light. There is a vision where there is protection and where love is binding every relationship together. (p. 205; Harper, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right. Cited by Rohr, “Jesus and the Reign of God," Nov 19, 2020. 

November 11, 2020

Winter Promises

Most years the advent of winter has evoked dread. Or, if and when approached in a spirit of surrender, it's inspired sighs, even commitment to long-suffering, a reluctant dedication to further the very important virtue of patience, to carry the hope of spring-coming. Yet often the chill in the air makes breathing out in those steam puffs. Perhaps they’re little smoke-signals asking permission to join the bears—how about hibernating until the world turns alive again? 

      But then this week late autumn’s falling, mostly fallen, leaves are sprinkling wonder. Today, as shown above, the woods’ opening increased witness of dawn’s beauty. And turning to the opposite western sky, a double rainbow arched to land both north and south, even before the rains arrive.

Yesterday the sun-lit woods, more bared to essence, showed a redbud reduced to a few leaves, looking like heart-shaped jewels were tracing out the bowing limbs in lines as graceful as ballerinas, almost weightless, defying gravity. Alongside it a young maple echoed the dance, yellow light against the dimmed exuberance of spring, the background of fallen leaves turning bronze and disappearing as if the superficial gives way, releasing the eternal.

      Instead of dreading winter, this year there’s an exciting sense of winter tracks wanting to be followed, the ones leading further into the “True Self.” 

Recent reading of Richard Rohr has prepared the way to welcome the closed-in season because it’s a time especially fitting for contemplation. In his book on the second half of life, Rohr explains how summer’s “loyal soldier” builds the container for a person’s winter work and how the soldier has to be thanked and dismissed.

“Paradoxically, your loyal soldier gives you so much security and validation that you may confuse his voice with the very voice of God. If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God. The loyal soldier is the voice of all your early authority figures. His or her ability to offer shame, guilt, warnings, boundaries, and self-doubt is the gift that never stops giving. Remember, it can be a feminine voice too; but it is not the ‘still, small voice’ of God (I Kings 19:13) that gives us our power instead of always taking our power.

The loyal soldier cannot get you to the second half of life. He does not even understand it. He has not been there. He can help you ‘get through hell,’ with the early decisions that demand black-and-white thinking; but then you have to say good-bye when you move into the subtlety of midlife and later life. . .

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of ‘common sense,’ of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful ‘Beatrice.’ The true faith journey only begins at this point…we have a container strong enough to hold the contents of our real life, which is always filled with contradictions and adventures and immense challenges. Psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things. (pp. 46, 48. Falling Upward; emphasis in original)

The passage invites return and deeper engagement in the resources such as the Mystical Languages of Unsaying  and to the Beloved, the stories of Layla… and forward into The Cloud of Unknowing and others.  Also, Rohr points particularly to Thomas Merton for guidance, especially to his New Seeds of Contemplation. Merton also reveals tracks on the pathway including those of St. John of the Cross and in his translation/versions of portions of Chuang Tzu. In his introduction, Merton writes: 

“The key to Chuang Tzu’s thought is the complementarity of opposites, and this can be seen only when one grasps the central ‘pivot’ of Tao which passes squarely through both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’ ‘I’ and ‘Not-I’ (p. 30). A sample appropriate to the forced inactivity of winter:

“… No one seems to know

how useful it is to be useless.”

The Way of Chuang Tzu, p. 59

These guides join others who teach and inspire in the way to the Beloved, the pathway home. This winter promises opportunity to re-trace ground turned years before, intent on deeper reflection. For example, these lines noted in last year’s autumn are calling:

“When the servant comes to know himself, thereby knowing God, he does not know God in Himself. Rather, he knows Him as his own Lord. This is the God who discloses Himself to the soul, and the self-disclosure is different from that experienced by any other soul. The God that I come to know through knowing myself is the God of my own belief, the water which has assumed the color of my cup.” William Chittick, Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination, p. 344 (cited in Light Enough, Sept 24, 2019). 

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.