Saying For Today: When you fall in love with this vision, that brings sublime bliss and unspeakable sadness, your tears become the tears of all, there is no longer just my vision, my pain, my bliss, my tears. Only in the Whole do we become wholly free.
*brian wilcox 'path through the wood'
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If you know the deep moaning of your own life and pay attention to others’ lives, someday you recognize that the deep moan is present in everyone’s life, and your cry turns into great compassion. Then, very naturally, you can share your life with others in a kind way. Even though you cannot explain it, understanding the deep moan in your own life spreads into others’ lives and gives them relief.
*Dainin Katagiri. The Light That Shines through Infinity: Zen and the Energy of Life.
Love the other as you love yourself.
*Gospel of Jesus
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My spiritual director handed me a video. I took it home. I sat down in my living room, pushed it in the slot on the television, and began viewing it. The video showed of a visit of two spiritual leaders, the Dalai Lama, dressed in his Tibetan attire and in exile from his homeland Tibet, and the leader of the Worldwide Community of Christian Meditation, Laurence Freeman, dressed in his Catholic attire. The one was called Father, the other the Dalai Lama. One represented a powerful church, the other a country upon which another country enacted genocide in the mid-last century, destroyed most of its holy places, and imprisoned and executed many of its Buddhist adepts.
And, here I was, in Florida USA, a Protestant pastor, unknown, struggling to lead a congregation to a more inclusive embrace of truth and others. I, too, felt in exile, an exile in the soul, and had long felt that way. Secretly, I had wanted a way out to something that felt like home. I recall driving, a few years later, southward on I75 toward a new congregation in South Florida. I saw a large factory to the right. The thought and feeling came, "I would like a job there, I would like to just walk away from serving the church as a pastor and work somewhere like that." Within I felt the ache of the constriction of trying to work in a religious culture that neither understood a contemplative orientation and, mostly, did not want to, and was busy trying to save itself, rather than realizing what it represented maybe did not need saving anyway.
I knew home had to do with love, had known this since childhood, and not as a comforting, sentimental idea or feeling, but with letting down the religious walls that keep us apart into the saved, the enlightened, the modern, ... , and the rest of the world. How could we not merely reach over our walls to one another, from one space to another space, one ideology to another ideology, but remove the walls and embrace each other in our space? My spiritual director knew this longing within me and, so, the video she placed in my hand.
The congregation I was serving, when viewing the video, was the most inclusive I had served since first serving a church at age 19, some 20 years prior. Most of the congregation, however, were not ready for this openness, this shared space with those that appeared so different from us. They clung tightly to nationalism and Christian religion for mooring, rather than allowing their confessed love for Christ to unmoor them and set them sailing on the Ocean for everyone, everywhere ~ the Ocean of God.
I watched as the two men, the Dalai Lama and Laurence Freeman, stood side-by-side at the border between the southern and northern of Ireland, a place symbolizing long-standing cultural and religious rivarly, and bloodshed. Soon, many children began running from the right of the two men. The children were smiling, faces aglow with glee. The Dalai Lama and Laurence Freeman welcomed and embraced the children. So, here I saw the apparent opposites, as I was told in childhood they were, and one going to a heaven and one doomed to a hell. Here, Buddhism and Christianity, embracing these lovely, little ones. Two men standing at the intersection of a divided country, testifying that we all belong to the same homeland, we are all fellow citizens. All together, one, in Grace, all embraced equally, not divided by culture, religion, or past.
Then, seeing this play itself out, I was surprised by my response. I began weeping profusely. I felt a deep love, a deep moan of sadness alive within. What came to mind was, "I've waited all my life to see this." I wept, and wept, face bowed, grateful that what was living within was pouring itself out from within, the within of everyone.
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What's the most important thing we each can do in creating this world?
Live it now, always, within yourself. Say "Yes" to it living itself in you. Unless that world is lived first within us, we cannot create it. We must already be intimate with that vision, we must see it, we must feel it ~ and deeply. Persons live new worlds, before the new worlds come to be. A second matter, very important, is to draw upon a Power not of us, not merely of our religion or culture. I call this, often, Grace. If we call it God, Allah, Krishna, something personal, that is okay, but that tends to become a word persons use that promotes their way, rather than our way, the Way. Yet, a word like Grace, that can point us beyond our ways, to the Mystery upon which we must draw to create a new life for us all.
Is pain inside necessarily a part of that?
Yes. You cannot have living this world within you and not hurt, and deeply. This does not mean you will always be in pain, nor does it mean it is a personal hurt. Yet, the pain will be alive within you, sometimes rising to the surface, likely often hovering just below the surface and inspiring how you live, how you relate with others, the work you do. It may even lead you into work you never dreamed you would do, or in directions suddenly that you had not contemplated taking.
Speaking of the pain, the moan, sounds like giving birth?
Yes, we are responsible to birth a new world, moment-by-moment. Pain is in the period of gestation, you can feel the new world so near, in your every breath, in your bones; yet, it can appear so distant, possibly, at times, an impossibility. We need to affirm that even if this new world never appeared, it is most worthy to be dreamed of, to be worked toward, to have it live itself within us as vision, as dream. We must act without attachment to results, being one with the dignity of the act. And, when we feel impatience for it, we need to become intimate with the impatience ~ that, too, is part of what arises from love for this vision, this not-yet and becoming world.
I recall some passage from the Christian Scriptures about this groaning of creation.
The passage is in the Book of Romans. I knew it in the Authorized Version, in my youth. It reads, "For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." We humans are sharing the groan with all life, with Earth.
It seems the church forgot about this in speaking of salvation for persons, rather than for Nature, for Earth.
Yet, we are Nature. When longing for the renewal of Earth, we are longing for our renewal, each one of us. Redemption is a return to the union between living beings and a living Earth, one Body. You cannot find where you and Earth, even the Universe, begins and ends. There is no point of division, unless you think the skin of your body is such a marker, and that is absurd, an absurdity we have been told is true. Eastern wisdom paths have, likewise, promoted this division between Nature and person, so we cannot simply point a finger at Christianity or the West.
Looking back on that day watching the video, how do you now see that moment of being overwhelmed with sadness?
Well, it was not just sadness alone. It was joy. Often, when crying, this is so with humans. We tend to separate the two, rather than seeing how in one moment we can be overwhelmed with what we could call a joyful-sadness. In that moment of seeing what the heart longs for, and it not yet realized, joy can be for you see it, it is happening, in gestation, and sadness that we are yet so far away from it. So close, so near.
I am reminded of words from Kahlil Gibran, in The Prophet, as I see it speaking of this love that longs, a love for what can be, and we cannot just wait for the love to give birth to this dream. We must live what is not yet, now, and this is a crucifixion, as Gibran speaks of before the quoted passage below, when saying, "Even as love crowns you, so shall she crucify you."
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself. But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness. To be wounded by your own understanding of love; And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
Hence, you cannot give yourself to love without bleeding. My tears that day were not simply my tears, they were the tears of Earth, and of everyone, seen and unseen who has within the vision and longing for peace on Earth and the healing of Earth. When you fall in love with this vision, that brings sublime bliss and unspeakable sadness, your tears become the tears of all, there is no longer just my vision, my pain, my bliss, my tears. Only in the Whole do we become wholly free.
*If video does not play from this site, press upper right to go to original site...
*The theme of "Lotus of the Heart" is 'Living in Love beyond Beliefs.' This work is presented by Brian K. Wilcox, of Maine, USA. You can order Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, through major online booksellers.
