|
'The Land Rests'
Amish Farm, Easton, ME
Experience of the Sacred seduces us,
so the Sacred can seize us.
* * *
Kabir Edmund Helminski, Sufi, in Living Presence -
At one point in my journey, my teacher's teacher, an eighty-year-old man, had been in a serious car accident, which had brought him close to death. For months the master's condition was uncertain, causing all those who loved him to become acutely aware of what his living, flesh-and-blood friendship meant to them. Eventually he would recover and live many more years. But when he was well enough to barely walk, he phoned my teacher to tell him that he would have a special lesson if my teacher could come to his apartment on a certain night. Since this was the first opportunity for the two of them to be together in months, my teacher was full of expectation.
They took a walk that evening, so slow and deliberate that it emphasized the attention required of the master for each painful step. They walked as far as one of the most elegant drinking establishments of that great world capital. My teacher's teacher opened the door of the tavern and they stepped just inside. It was as if they were perfectly invisible, while the patrons, the most fashionable men and women, continued in their loud, intoxicated conversations. "See?" he simply said.
* * *
William Wordsworth, in "The World is Too Much with Us" -
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;-
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
* * *
What Helminski saw in the lesson his teacher's teacher was offering by leading his teacher into the pub concerned the prevalent obsession with experiences of life. Helminski questions, "Are we consumed by the experiences of life?" In theistic terms, this is like asking, "Are you in love with God or your experiences of God?"
In the burning away of our attachment to experiences, we enjoy intimacy with Life. This intimacy is not an experience. It is a non-experience - this the heart longs for, and its searching is for such sense-less Love. Experience can escort you to the door of the non-experience, but it cannot open the door to that bliss.
In falling in love with Life, we fall out of love with the experiences we call my life. We die from this my life into Life. And the more we die, the more we live. We come to welcome the dying, for we are tasting so of the Love. Hence, being emptied of the my life, one is filled with Grace, and emptied of the pursuit of experiences of Spirit, one is filled with Spirit.
Consequently, we are led into the Abode of the Beloved - the heart. Here, we learn to enjoy the non-experience with the experience. In traditional religious terms, all life becomes sanctified - yet, it already was. Nothing has changed, while everything has changed - including you.
* * *
*(C) Brian K. Wilcox, 2020
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse. The book is a collection of poems based on mystical traditions, especially Christian and Sufi, with extensive notes on the teachings and imagery in the poetry.
*To contact Brian, write to LotusoftheHeart@gmx.com .
|
