shine on...

As our time away in Montreal ripens, giving me a chance to slow down and look inward, I am grateful. For the next few weeks, there will be time for both deep rest and solitude to read, think, and pray more fully. Already, I am learning not only what is going on with Di's health, but also how to better support her as she makes sense of it all. The mystery of her maladies can be a sacred invitation into deeper tenderness if I am willing to get out of the way. The words I read earlier this week from Fr. Teilhard de Chardin continue to be helpful:

Like an artist who is able to make use of a fault or an impurity in the stone they are sculpting or the bronze they are casting so as to produce more exquisite lines or a more beautiful tone, God, without sparing us the partial deaths, nor the final death, which form an essential part of our lives, transfigures them by integrating them in a better plan - provided we lovingly trust in God. Not only our unavoidable ills but our faults, even our most deliberate ones, can be embraced in that transformation, provided always we repent of them. Not everything is immediately good to those who seek God: but everything is capable of becoming good.

This is, yet again, the wisdom of the Paschal Mystery embracing reality. As de Chardin notes elsewhere: Life, as a whole, makes no mistakes. This reminds me of the way Fr. Matthew Fox once restated an insight from the 13th-century mystic, Meister Eckhart: Reality is the will of God; it can always be better, but we must start with what is real. No place for magical thinking, denial, or fatalistic passivity in the authentic faith journey. Yes, there is surrender as the Serenity Prayer calls acceptance (and some contemporary feminists call relinquishing): God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. There is transcendence, too, as we connect to a love greater than anything our imagination can grasp. But transformative spirituality is always more of a dance than a destination where our volition as a partner welcomes the embrace of Divine grace. It is incarnational. Embodied. Real. And we can always say "no."

Fr. Jon Swales opens his new poem, "Three Sisters," describing some of what it means to live into a spirit-less era:

We live in a disenchanted age. A secular age
where meaning is reduced, mystery explained away,
and the world becomes what can be measured,
priced, consumed.
We forsake the living water and drink from
broken cisterns. And wounded,
reduced humanity forgets what it is.
Not image, but animal.
Not creature, but consumer.
Not soul, but matter.
We stumble east of Eden, exiled from a home
we can barely remember. Lost.

de Chardin put it like this: The only thing that matters in our existence is to live more and more intensely from the inside. And this is possible always and everywhere. That is, to be in the world in ways that release our truest self from shame, fear, and deceit. To nurture what Merton calls the eternal diamond within - that can never be defiled - so that it might shine more fully outward. As Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount:

Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth. If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness? You’ve lost your usefulness and will end up in the garbage. Here’s another way to put it: You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven.

And so the band played on...