If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on...
The second from the Quaker singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer in a new poem that illuminates the heart of Psalm 131(like a child at rest on her mother's breast):
Have you ever noticed that on busy days,
The streets and workplaces,
Elevators and escalators,
Crackle with current
All that passion and propulsion
Charging the top layer of the world
Like the static skin of a ballon being rubbed
Across the top of a head.
Elevators and escalators,
Crackle with current
All that passion and propulsion
Charging the top layer of the world
Like the static skin of a ballon being rubbed
Across the top of a head.
But today,
In a bustling airport
in a moving stream of here to there,
I stood next to a dark eyed young woman
Who was swaying back and forth
Her sleepy little boy hitched up
On the natural shelf of her right hip.
She was humming a tune
That all mothers know
That all mothers sing
That makes all children sigh
As then lay down their heads,
A song that is as old
As the oldest thing we know.
In a bustling airport
in a moving stream of here to there,
I stood next to a dark eyed young woman
Who was swaying back and forth
Her sleepy little boy hitched up
On the natural shelf of her right hip.
She was humming a tune
That all mothers know
That all mothers sing
That makes all children sigh
As then lay down their heads,
A song that is as old
As the oldest thing we know.
There it is,
The true sound
The contented purr
The intoned prayer
Always
Always
Just below
The surface of things.
Fr. Richard Rohr tells us time and again that the only way to become agents of compassionate social action and live meaningful lives embracing the eternal is through contemplation. We must be changed from the inside out. Anything less is delusional.
So, after a lovely morning collecting funds for Church World Service's CROP Walk to Fight hunger with five members of my faith community - and taking a wee afternoon nap - I think it is time to talk Lucie on a walk before shopping and cooking dinner for my honey.
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