We Share One Life, We Are One Life
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When Jesus looked up he saw some wealthy people putting their offerings into the treasury and he noticed a poor widow putting in two small coins. He said, “I tell you truly,this poor widow put in more than all the rest; for those others have all made offerings from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has offered her whole livelihood.”
*Luke 21.1-4 (NAB)
Possibly, I am most truthful about God when I am silent, when I am saying nothing of God. Possibly, the most fruitful and faithful worship is silence, for God cannot be spoken and, also, silence tempers the ignorance and arrogance that tends to want to pull down Grace into the limitations of the thought of oneself and one's tradition. I have come to the conclusion that, at least for myself, it is incumbent upon me to speak from and into the Silence, even as I seek to live this among peoples of a tradition that talk of God from talk, not silence, and its professional ministers mostly show little, if any, kinship with the bliss of awe known in the great Silence. Silence, to me, is Nothing, a Life teeming with Mystery, with Grace, with Beauty and Truth. Amen.
*Brian K. Wilcox
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In reading the daily lectionary reading from the Gospel for today, I asked, "How does this narrative of the widow giving all relate to our lives?" At first, the narrative spoke on a surface level, of outer giving of outer money. I could see myself putting money into the offering at the church. Somehow, this did not speak to me deeply, though it did not speak wrongly. Later, I sensed an understanding of an inner poverty and a giving of oneself as having nothing to give, a giving of that nothing to receive nothing, except Grace Itself, or God GodSelf, which is No-thing, yet the Nothing that touches and fills the Heart with Everything.
Christian spirituality and other faiths often agree on this nothing. We Christians tend to term this as personal, but the impersonal is part of our tradition, likewise. In the impersonal we often speak the same language as Buddhists, where the idea of emptiness, or Emptiness, is more central in its teaching. In Christianity this teaching tends to be relegated to less mainstream teachings, in contemplative spirituality. In Hinduism the many thousands of gods and goddesses, the spiritual Hindu affirms, are ways of imaging and worshipping one Reality, one God, the One (Brahman). So, whether coming from the plurality of images in Hinduism or such an emphasis on One as in Islam or Judaism, we can arrive at one acceptance that there is only a single Nothing, whatever we call That - by one name or many names or no name. The Name Itself is single, is One. Even the ground of the Christian Trinity is One, as the apostolic Church recognizes, and has from the beginning, while many Christians tend to treat the Trinity as three personal Beings, or Gods. The principal formulators of the orthodox teaching on the Trinity clarified that the Trinity is not an explanation of the One, or God, but an image that points to the Truth Itself. However, this teaching may, better than any other, point to the intuition of the lively, beautiful paradox of the One-being-the-Many and the Many-being-the-One.
Christian contemplation is a return to Emptiness, not as an absence but as the absence of thing-ness. Actually, this nothing, or no-thing, is the fecund Ground of everything. Therefore, the Ground is the ground of even our sense and talk of No-Thing. If we trace all things back, we return to Emptiness. Yet, this Emptiness is not another thing among things, and this Nothing is not an object we can relate with, except as that Nothing expresses itself to us, in Grace. This is part of the teaching about Christ, the Word, in the Christian scriptures. The Word is the formless Presence, while the Christ represents the expression of the Word in form, in body. Mary, representing matter, or Mother, is the means of that Formless becoming form. So, in Buddhism we hear the Buddha teach, "Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form." We Christians can say, "The Word is Jesus, Jesus is the Word." Saying this is enough, and the very seeking to understand this easily leads us into the arrogance of the mind, not the humbleness and poverty required of Pure Faith and Disinterested Love.
Without further explanation, which tends to take us away and trap us in thing-ness, by words about Nothing, I leave you with these words from St. John of the Cross, from Ascent of Mount Carmel, and with the challenge to consider seeing yourself as the widow, who in her having nothing to give gives all she has to give - in this paradox is the Mystery of all true faith:
To reach satisfaction in everything,
desire satisfaction in nothing.
To come to possession of everything,
desire the possession of nothing.
To arrive at being all,
desire to be nothing.
To come to the knowledge of everything,
desire the knowledge of nothing.
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We are each a lovely, pure Rose, in the Garden of Grace.
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*Photo "Christ Church, Blakenall Heath...," Gary Crutchley.
