Drop the rain glass
over my head

A storm with thunder
Let it scatter the dimmer light

Earth tottering, breaking up of what
kept us apart

A fusion of lightening -
I into You as we two One

No more this playing with religion
Make wild Love with me Here

No more gazing into the sanctum
Pull me into the streets screaming

With one kiss of Your lips, silence me, and
My eyes will flow with tears of Wine

All the tamers of Spirit-
Stay out of Here!

*Brian K. Wilcox. "Tears of Wine."

A man found an eagle's egg. He placed it in a backyard hen's nest. The eaglet hatched with the chicks and grew up with them.

All his life the eagle did what backyard chickens do, thinking he was one. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. He thrashed his wings, and he flew a few feet into the air.

The eagle grew old, and one day he saw a magnificent bird far above. It glided in graceful majesty among powerful currents, with scarcely a movement of its wings. Something within him was awakened, as though he had forgotten something important, like a mystery trying to break forth, but he did not know what.

The aged eagle stared in awe. He asked, "Who's that?" Said a neighbor, "That's the eagle, king of birds. He belongs to sky, we to earth. We're chickens, we're not meant to fly like that."

So, the eagle lived and died like a chicken. That's what he thought he was. After all, that's what he'd always been told.

"The first thing that happened was the sound of a hollow darkness. I've never heard it except there. It was very, very big - sort of like an oncoming train - but I knew it was in my ears, it was not external. And then there was a hand at the back of my neck, pressing me very strongly down. Everything is dark. Everything is black. And a voice that said, 'You belong to me.' And my response was, 'If you are God. I belong to God.' And immediately everything turned to light."

*Barbara Bradley Hagerty. Fingerprints of God. Anecdote from an interview with a Sophia Burnham.

God - Who is Mystery - unfolds at deeper, more expansive levels of awareness and life. Possibly, the trying to stay at a "safe" distance - a safe experience -, is irrational and unconscious knowledge of what will occur to one if he or she opens more to God as Mystery.

In her book, Fingerprints of God, Hagerty writes of the challenge she faced when confronted with the call to a mystical experience of God:

I was quite comfortable with my faith life, with the rhythms of a certain kind of prayer and reading each morning, a certain type of church and pastor, a reliable faith where I could turn a knob to get hot water from the faucet or a flame from the stove.

And the resistance is related to an innate wisdom about what can happen when one opens to God-as-God, not my or our God. Again, returning to the interview between Hagerty and Burnham:

If a spiritual experience is real, she said, it will transform you, fling your worldview and priorities, your relationships and your personality, up in the air like a two-year old hurling a deck of cards. It can make you a stranger to your friends, to your family, and to your own psyche.

In light of the above, no wonder Hagerty entitled a chapter in her book: The God Who Breaks and Enters.

Over a century ago, in his introduction to his lectures to a rationalist, skeptical audience of academia - lectures that would become the classic book on the scientific exploration of religious experience - Varieties of Religious Experience -, William James said:

The first thing to bear in mind is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves.

So we are faced with a dis-ease caused, partly, by religious systems that keep eagles on the ground. Then, the eagles try to find on the ground what is only found in the sky. Then, there is this ongoing propagation of a subtle desperation for Something More, one not sated, only silenced by religiousness - even under the word spiritual or word Christian.

I encourage you to say yes, and let Wisdom lead you to ever-more-fulfilling experiences of divine Grace, and liberating Love. And what shall you find? Fuller and fuller express-ing of God - of Love - , as Ilia Delio, writing about the spirituality of St. Francis of Assisi writes, in A Heart Full of Love:

The power of love is the Spirit, for it is the Spirit sent by Christ who conforms us to Christ, not by erasing our identity but rather by shaping the persons we are into the vessels of love we are created to be. The Spirit sets us free in love to be for love, because the Spirit leads us to the truth of who we are in God in whom we find our freedom. Anything that does not lead to true freedom must be rejected as untrue.

Thus, the gospel is a constant call to freedom, an invitation to shape our own lives rather than allow ourselves to be influenced by an imaginary world order or to have any code simply thrust upon us.