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LOTUS OF THE HEART
All is Welcome Here
Living in Love beyond Beliefs
The following I wrote during a time in 2014 in which I returned to live in the community I lived until age 19. On returning, I lived in an old tobacco barn, near my dad and brother. I moved into - after initially living with my dad, in the home I was raised - the abandoned barn for solitude and quiet. This afforded time to do much walking in the rural community, where I had never wanted to live again, not until, at least, I retired. I needed the return to heal, to unite with the past. Sometimes we cannot go forward, until we go back.
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Living up-hill from the creek I crossed many times in childhood and youth, as a middle-aged adult over age fifty, I am drawn back to those waters. I often walk down the hill to get a brief look, seeing how high the waters are and enjoying an admiration of the waters flowing, meandering through the trees. Why? What is this admiration of such an ordinary sight to most, one that many others likely would feel no awe before? These are evocative waters to me.
After taking a walk to the creek yesterday, this morning I have been ruminating on it – seeing the waters often in memory, flowing cold and dark - and a Scripture passage from the Christian New Testament. In St. John's Gospel, Jesus meets a woman. He tells her he can give her living water. She being at a well to draw water, as often, he tells her that the water she draws will not satisfy her thirst but for a time. She will thirst again. The water he would give her, this living water, would leave her satisfied, not to thirst again.
"What is this living water?," she asked. In Jewish thought living water was flowing water. This water contrasted with water bounded, sitting still. So, let us think on this, today.
Living water? Life-giving. Ever-fresh. Ever-renewed. Flowing clear. In contrast to stale, enclosed, and polluted. So clean, I recall drinking from the creek when a child.
Jesus uses an image to connect the woman to her immediate experience. He does not give her an answer. He uses an image, like a metaphor to evoke from her an exploration, to awaken her more clearly to her longing and the futility of fulfillment in her present way of life. Answers from the surface of life will not satisfy her, Jesus knew, and they will not content us. Our longing arises from the depths, we need a reply from those depths. The reply will be evocative, for prosaic answers do not fit how Grace speaks such sublime, graceful revelations of Being.
As I reflect on the living water of the creek and on Jesus' reference to living water, I am reminded we seek a fulfillment that cannot be met by anything bounded by space and time. Yes, I must live in the boundaries of this space and time. That is the sacred Calling now. Yet, to be content, I must open to Life that is not a mere duration, a sequence of happenings internal or external: the Boundless, the Timeless. And, while persons call This many different names and open to This in many different ways, I am reminded Presence is intimate, even One with the life I feel by simply relaxing and being silent for a few moments, or feeling by living gracefully the life given me in its ordinariness. This Intimacy is not bounded by feelings. Grace is Intimate always, breathing me into being, as surely in the sense of Its absence as when I am overwhelmed by Its Nearness.
How do we open our whole selves to this living water, this Truth? By Love, Love before loving, and in every moment of selfless self-giving. By being intimate with this moment, I am present to the Grace ever-present to me, flowing to me from before and through the manifestations of Nature. I find a fulfillment in opening the Heart to Something this world cannot give, birthless and deathless. All the great spiritual Teachers have pointed us to This, beyond the limitations of traditions from which they spoke to us. They did not tell us what the living water is - Jesus did not -, for they could not. Grace is indefinable, even as the beauties of Nature awe us and leave us speechless in wonderment. The answer lies within and outside, and before and beyond both. Possibly you will see there are untold Depths to this Life and that this Life leads you to surrender more and more to the Wonderful, Awe-inspiring Presence living and life-giving. Possibly, we can know this Presence only as a Mystery, one that unfolds to us an increasing sense of Appreciation and Gratitude.
*Move cursor over pictures for photographer and title.
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