We Share One Life, We Are One Life
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*"Meditation." Sudjuanda, Flickr.
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I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and yet we didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned, perhaps, into thinking that the real action was metropoliton and all this was just boring hinterland. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.
*Robert M. Prisig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
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Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise
From outward things, whate'er you may believe.
There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fullness; and around,
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
This perfect, clear perception-which is truth,
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
Binds it, and makes all error: and to KNOW
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without.
*Robert Browning. From poem "Paracelsus."
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To say "within," spiritually, is to say "intimate, here and now always." We need not think of "within" as a location, a place apart from another place. However we think of it, location assists us in orienting ourselves to an every-where, which is to say a no-one-where, Mystery. Yet, without rituals and words that locate, we struggle to relate. Regardless, Truth is, which is to say, Truth is everywhere and nowhere. And in this Jesus sounds, in the Gospels, much more Zen Buddhist than he does what Christianity has become: which is principally, now, an emotive-rational faith--thankfully, there are exceptions, and the contemplative tradition is one such exception.
Prayer, as all sincere ritual and its worship, is a human means, however divinely inspired, to experience a Glory always near, but often not felt or recognized. The experience can feel like a releasing of the Splendor.
Some persons so surrender to this Splendour, that they experience habitually, with little or no distraction, the Glory in and through all things. They come to see that this Glory is so within that there is no within or without, finally. They see, so know, the Splendour as the oft-concealed Grace that gives life to all things, is the life of all things. They know that of which St. Paul speaks to philosophers of his time, as recorded in Acts 17.28 of the Christian Scripture, "For in Him we live and move and are; as, also, certain of your poets have said, 'For of Him, also, we are offspring.'" They know this "Him" is only an intuiting toward a Mystery unknowable, that cannot be known as anything, but can only, at last, be received as that which can be loved most in the certainty arising from not-knowing. So, allow yourself to be with something or someone, just be with, and knowing can arise that is not any consequence of understanding or naming that something or someone.
We are each a lovely, pure Rose, in the Garden of Grace.
The Sacred in Me bows to the Sacred in You
BRIAN .
