Читать книгу Cairn-Space - N. Thomas Johnson-Medland - Страница 4

Cairns have decorated the landscapes of cultures throughout time. Piles of stone—one stone placed on top of another—are set in place all over the earth to recall battles, identify burial sites, mark trails, and spur hearts and minds to remember sacred, noble, and critical events. They are landmarks. They are sacramental presences in space and time.

I first encountered cairns in my spiritual journey while staying at retreat houses on the East Coast. Most of the cairns were built in out of the way places along trails. Folks who had gone on retreat had constructed the rock piles where they had had spiritual experiences of “metanoia” or conversion of heart. Since that day I have seen them in countless locations, but mostly while hiking or on retreat. They are outward manifestations of peoples’ inner realities.

Part of the beauty of cairns is their impermanence. You need to restructure them periodically—to interact with them and share some sort of relationship—as they fall down or apart with the passage of time and the weather of our days on this earth-place. Rock slides off of rock and needs to be replaced. Rain erodes the supportive earth beneath cairns and more dirt needs to be added if the rocks are to stay above the ground. People automatically reach for the stones, to rebuild the piles, to shift the dirt when they see them dismantled or in disarray. Cairns help people work things out.

It is the same with our spiritual lives. We are constantly building our lives in God. We develop individual practices in our spiritual lives and we have beliefs, hopes, dreams, and memories. They are the cairns that dot the landscape of our lives: of our heart, and mind, and soul. Each practice is made up of many parts; as are the beliefs, hopes, dreams, and memories. These are the stones; piled on stones.

Scripture is a cairn. Prayer is a cairn. Worship is a cairn. Icons are cairns. Mind is a cairn. Emotion is a cairn. Community itself is a cairn.

All matter and manifest phenomenon are cairns of something. Everything stands sacramentally as an indicator of something else. Mind and matter reflect things beyond themselves and unfold panoplies of dimension with each encounter. One thing leads us to another, as the intrinsic holographic nature of reality is exposed—woven in and through everything that is.

Some days the cairns fall apart. Some days they are steady and true. Sometimes we can pass them by using them as grid-markers on our travels. Sometimes we must stop and take the time to re-establish what they stand to represent.

We are always about the process of building and rebuilding our lives and the cairns in them—whether they are solid markers on the outside of our lives or are ethereal markers on the inside of our lives. Things don’t always hold together. Memories are just as fragile as stone piles standing against the elements. Meaning falls apart—apparently. This speaks to our fragility and the frailty of life itself.

Cairns speak to the frailty of all matter and of the mind-stuff contained throughout that matter. Meaning often needs to be reinvested in things. Special signs and markers along the trail of life must often be rearranged so we can carry their presence into the future. Things get disturbed and out of place.

All of the things that are markers in our lives are opportunities to go inside ourselves, discover meaning; and in that meaning, uncover God. There are special dates in our lives: baptisms, confirmations, graduations, new jobs, marriages, and deaths. Each of these are cairns to us—calling out to us even though the day of their happening has passed. There are special people in our lives; special places, too. These are also cairns. These are outward manifestations of inward realities that change us, and shape us, and inform every molecule of our existence. These milestones of life are far from gone, they are woven into our consciousness in a way that often seems elusive, but they are present and often are the “hidden cause” of the direction and hope our journey assumes.

Cairns like all markers are meant to remind us of something. That remembrance is calling us to come, sit, review, and re-connect. They sign for us to go inside and link-up with an event, a process, a person, or an idea. They ask us to wrestle with things we may have tucked away—just out of memory. This wrestling is a form of relating to the things we are remembering. They are episodes in meaning. Things do matter; they tell us something. Everything has meaning.

Cairns reveal and engender a wrestling process in our lives. They show us how we assign meaning and power to what we have seen, tasted, heard, sensed, smelled, and handled with our own hands—with our own lives.

Because they straddle meaning, cairns are sacramental. They are outward manifestations of inward realities; that is, things on the outside that reveal what is important to us, and how things seem to work on the inside—behind the veil of the visible.

In the true mystic tradition, everything straddles meaning and is potentially available to reveal the inner life, God Himself, and all that Is. Everything around us and within us is a cairn toward the experience of the inner life, God Himself, and all that Is.

Everything is a sacramental cairn if we are watchful, attentive, and open to its presence and what it reveals. Phenomenon have meaning beyond themselves. Meaning unfolds when we intentionally create a place to watch it blossom.

In the wrestling of remembrance, we bring the meaning of our memories to the fore and we dust it off. We stand before all phenomenal reality and wrap ourselves around and all through existence, perception, conception, and being; and then we store that in consciousness.

We encounter things anew because of cairns. They are visible stories from our days gone by; stories that ask us to somehow interact with those past moments and create new moments of growth right here in the present; bringing what was into what is. Simple things reveal eternity.

I am encouraged by the sight of familiar cairns around the camp where we now live. They instantly bring back memories of my past that bolster me up and remind me of who I am and who I have been. I may have added a stone to a pile because I sat and prayed at this place. I may have added a stone because I sang a hymn in this spot. I may have built a cairn to mark off the place of my repentance. I may have laid a cairn to remind me Jesus spoke to me here. Cairns shape who I am becoming using the stuff of who I have been.

Cairns lead us somewhere. They lead us to and provide us with a sacred space— to a particular spot here on this earth-place or within our interior-space. From within this spot we recreate sacred time anew. They ask us to stop. They ask us to pause and recall—taking a moment to get our bearings.

It is not uncommon to find stone cairns that have been set up as trail markers. These geologic GPS coordinates, piled on the ground, help us to find our way. We remember our way in life because of the piles all around us.

The photo albums that lay about our home are GPS co-ordinates to other places in time and space. Each picture, a cairn that marks whole chapters of life that have seemingly disappeared. The birth of our sons, the hiking of a trail, a trip to the Isle of Skye; they are not gone. The photos remind me of the place in my consciousness within which I have planted those days and ways of life. As I water the seeds of my past, I am informed with a whole new vigor that my life has led me to this moment. This moment is built on so much more than I can see; but it is available within me.

We are called to pull the past into the present in order to shape our future—in our remembering. This is always the power of signs. They lead us to our future, by way of our past. We stand at a cairn and remember; we dream, we hope, we become.

This is not unlike the call of Jesus to “do this in memory of me”; to celebrate the Eucharist. The cairns in this Jesus-meeting are the species of bread and wine. They bring clarity to this moment and present us with images and facts that may not be visible, but live deeply in us as realities we assent to. We learn that we are to be broken and poured out for the life of the world as these Jesus-meeting cairns suggest. The words “in memory” or “in remembrance” of Jesus in this short passage come from the Greek word “anamnesis.” This word is all about the concept of bringing the past into the present and the present into the past. It is a merging or confluence of time.

The cairns we speak of from this time forward will be cairns that may embody all of this. They may mark off God-space, heart-space, memories, or ideas. They may reveal hidden causes in the fabric of our phenomenology, or hint for us to listen for the whispering wind; sacramental cairns on the landscape of our lives. They may point to interior dimensions we had no idea existed within our heart, and mind, and soul. We will amble around the ideas of sacred-space, prayer-space, and sacramental living. We will encounter and wrestle with God all along the way. We will look for and stop at the cairns along the geography of our spiritual heritage.

What markers have we used to remember God in prayer? What markers have we laid to remind us that union is possible? How has the Church (itself a cairn of God) found its way and marked its journey on this earth-place? What have we learned from all that we have lived? Who has been important to us? What have they revealed in the way of meaning?

Jacob erected a cairn after he awoke from his dream. He piled stones on top of the stone he had rested his head on through the night. An odd pillow for some. His dream was of a ladder reaching from heaven to earth. In that dream there were angels ascending and descending on the ladder. Jacob marked that place of “holy encounter” and named it Beth-El; the “Place of God.” It later became the place of meeting in the Temple of Israel—the Holy of Holies. His proclamation that “surely God has been in this place” is a critical passage in understanding the meaning of cairns in our lives. They mark off epiphanies and theophanies: God-meeting places.

Cairns are not meant to be towers of Babel, reaching to the heavens to find God—somehow off in the future. They are meant to wake us up to finding God right here—NOW—right among us. We encounter a cairn, we stop, and we turn within to figure out the meaning behind the encounter that is marked off by these rocks. What does this place mean? What does it exude? What does it call us into ourselves to find? This is how it is with everything there is. Everything has the chance to be a marker of union with the Divine—NOW. Not off in the future. Not if we do “just one more thing, or build it just a bit higher.” HERE. NOW.

I am sure Babel must have started as a cairn, but the obsession of the task carried the builders away. They forgot they were laying a marker and figured they could keep building a stairway to heaven. Out of control, and perhaps believing “more is better”, they thought they could navigate the heavens by building an escalator to God. They got lost in their project. The true stairway was within.

Babel shows us the natural outcome of trying to build a cairn high enough to experience the abode of God outside of our heart. Once we reach a certain fevered pitch, and the rocks are high enough, we forget that God is accessible within and our ability to communicate becomes hampered. Trying to climb to God on rocks, our language is put to confusion. We begin to lose our ability to make sense and interpret all that we see. Babel is a cairn gone bad.

It reminds me of the present nature of the Church. Our lives in Christ were meant to be a testimony of God with us, God within us. We started building and then lost control. We built the pile so big that confusion descended on us and everything went to pieces. Mainline denominations are failing because—like Babel—we have focused on building “the machine.” We thought our tower would take us to God; that our buildings and our programs would take us to God. Again, the stairway is within. The heart is the sacred space, not the program, or the building, or the tower.

Cairns are simple rock piles on the surface of the earth, marking spaces in which we encountered and wrestled with God in the commonplace hugger-mugger of our daily existence. They are meant to help us remember our dreams and meetings and to use those memories to live our lives more fully into the future. Cairns are asterisks on the landscape and geography of our simple lives. But, they are powerful asterisks. Like all images, they will fade and breakdown; our analogies will sometimes fail. But, as markers and asterisks, they are starting points. If one does not begin somewhere, one has not begun.

***

These Simple Foods

Holding

these simple foods,

bread

and wine,

I am forced into

my heart

to meet Jesus,

to wrestle with Him

as He changes me

into body

and blood.

This remembrance

is so real,

I am undone

and become someone I would

not have become

if we did not

meet

to eat

His sacrifice.

They

mark more than

time along the

way of my life.

They

mark time

along the

path of God with

man.

Simple

foods are they

which bring the

heavens down

to the earth

and raise our dirt

to the cosmos

above.

With these gifts –

given and returned –

we become terrestrial angels

and celestial men.

One space

one time

for all places

and through all time.

***

As humans we are always processing the world around us. We bring it inside of us, encounter it, wrestle with it, become transformed by it, and live our lives based on these adjustments—these transformations. Our lives are changed by these meetings.

In essence, everything in our lives is a cairn of meaning. Everything around us means something to us. Everything around us informs us and moves us into some sort of transformative encounter.

We store all that we encounter in a consciousness that eludes us. The mystery of what things mean is inside of us. Because of that the mystic heart knows that everything exists on the edge of becoming a sacrament. It all rides on the decision of the will.

The meaning of things in our lives changes the world around us as we affect the rest of life with the identity we become in the process. People help us to become new people. Places enable us to adjust how we live. Objects transform our present into future. Old things pass away and all things become new. These meetings are themselves markers of who we have been over time: elements of our own presence.

We leave markers everywhere. We tend to remember those that are in the places we have had our wrestling-encounters. These larger events in life are easier to remember. We save the memories of places where something special and memorable occurred. Some of these markers are left in the outside world as mementos, cairns, gardens, chapels, and grottoes. Some of these markers are left in the inside world as impressions, feelings, thoughts, dreams, and hopes; pieces of our becoming. Whether they are outside or inside, these markers are our cairns. That they may be outside or inside moves them into sacramental reality.

“How Great Thou Art” is a cairn for me. Inside the meaning of this marker along the way is a heart and mind filled with wonder, connections, and grandparents. I loved this hymn—and still do—because of its importance to my maternal grandmother. Mom-mom loved that hymn. Mom-mom loved that hymn because her mother loved that hymn. I sang it with abandon in her memory at church each Sunday it was selected, and again at my grandfather’s funeral. It became a family cairn over time.

Mom-mom and Pop-pop became real to me as I sang each note. They became real in my heart. Every time I sang it, a neural pathway was wired from my insides to God and to my grandparents. When I sang it, I became one with God, with myself, and with my grandparents. It was a hyperlink to multiple sites. It became a communication of great import. I stored this memory inside for future visits of and to the hymn.

The time we have shared together on this earth-space is littered with markers of our lives together. My sons are cairns for me. I can look at them and remember the various stages and “people they have been.” When they were little, they said things I will carry inside for the rest of my life. Things that made me laugh, or cry. Their concerts, their plays and pageants, the camping trips and vacations; these things mark time for me.

Their presence in my life helps me to rebuild who I am on a daily basis. Sometimes a simple smile can take me back over years and places. All of our cairns have the potential of doing this. Everything can be a trip wire for being snared in meaning.

***

All of the places we build and set aside for prayer and remembrance are simply the “subconscious mind” making signposts leading us inside. All that we have been in the past leaves a trail of breadcrumbs for us to find along the way. We stumble on the crumbs, pick them up, and remember the value and meaning we were a part of at some other time. We follow this communion trail into our own selves. What we find is a consciousness littered with moments and meaning; a matrix of all that has gone on before. We find a space within that provides us with the opportunity to sit and taste the morsels we have collected along the way.

If we look at all of the things we hold as dear, we will see our cairns; we will see the trail of breadcrumbs that leads us in. If we notice all of the places we have been transformed and changed, we will see our cairns. If we recognize the high points and low points of our lives, we will see our cairns. If we remember all of those people who have reached out to us throughout our lives, we will see our cairns. If we note each book, thought, notion, and idea we have fleetingly held, we will see our cairns. If we were able to unpack the events of each breath of our lives, we would see our cairns—all of them.

If we follow the lead and meaning these cairns provide, we are blessed to be able to find an interior room—a space inside ourselves—in which to settle down and remember. We can trace the memory into a quiet chamber of the heart and hold it in our grasp there; gently realizing its depth. If we cannot immediately find a shelter within, these cairns require us to search hard until we find one, or to build one ourselves.

And so, we find or build a chapel, a cell, or a cave in our heart where we may sit and unpack the meaning of our lives. We build on this space, to sit and sup with the Divine One who is the ground of all being. We commune with God and all that we have been and all that we have become. We bring into the tabernacle of our heart the fullness of our mind and soul.

We have this place in us—whether we recognize it or not—that is our TRUE SELF; a place where we hold all of the strings of the awareness of our life. It is the place where all things come together. It is the place where God dwells. We retreat there in time of trouble and change. This place is called the heart. This cairn-space is a dot in eternity; a spiritual atom within which all creation is born and housed.

***

If we can recognize this process of going within and find this place that is within, we will be on the right road. We will be living up to our full potential as sacramental beings. We will have struck out on the most sacred journey—the journey to the heart—and we will have found there not only a home, but our true selves. In fact, the heart is the greatest cairn there is. It is the cairn established by God, to mark off our experiences of His Presence. The heart is the Holy of Holies.

This is just another way of looking at what is inside of us. The Fathers of the Church called this the Royal Road. The Royal Road always leads us to the place where God dwells in us. It leads us to the heart.

There is a longing deep within us; a yearning for this heart space within which we find oneness. It is the place we find our core identity. We await opportunities to settle into our being and feel a unity with God and all that is a part of His creation. Every experience of worship is a longing that we might discover the Presence of God in our lives and yield to that Presence. We perform acts of kindness with the hopes of catching a glimpse of God in the beggars and sick. We look for signs outside of what we sense inside.

Our eyes dart this way and that looking for a place we can call our own, a place of meeting. We want to meet the Divine One and do it again and again. We search desperately for cairns and markers that will call us into this place. We even try to buy and consume things that we believe will help us achieve this goal of “inwardness.” This place exists already. We buy books that give us clues. We attend workshops that reveal the way. We must simply interpret the cairns along the way as signs that point in.

Setting out and finding God-spaces, meeting-places, and realms of connection is really what “the path” is all about. Some people recognize that this quest for unity and relationship is at the root of everything we do—NOW. Finding God drives us to search all the more. The markers on the outside help move us to the inside, and there we wait for Godot. And, although this space exists in all of us, it is paradoxically waiting to be built.

***

Some tell us that waiting for Godot or searching for God is an empty task; it is absurd. But, it is not the search for the Holy One (the search for our core self and its relation to God) that is empty and absurd in the end. What is empty and absurd is not recognizing that we are all seeking wholeness in God—NOW.

We all hunger and thirst to find our completion in the Divine Wholeness. Some pretend they are looking for something other than God. They believe they aspire to be “better” people or more “learned.” It is simply that they do not know to call this aching passion within a hungering for God and the divine completion this represents. They have not examined the lineaments of this craving. All craving for completeness is a craving for the Holy One. It is a yearning to be One with the One. It is the rest of Saint Augustine that is only put to rest when it rests in God.

This path of hungering, longing, craving, and desiring is a path toward the heart. The heart is the place of ultimate encounter and union. Whether we believe we are questing for wholeness, integrity, actualization, or God, the quest is the same. In the non-Christian East it is said that we already have all that we long for; we must simply wake up.

We are hunting the Divine. We look everywhere for the perfect spot to unite. We turn everything upside-down to find our center—our heart. We look all around outside, to find the place that is inside. The greatest cairn is already within, and at the same time it clambers to be established. We have what we need, we must simply wake up.

Ultimately, all cairns are about getting into heart-space and experiencing the relationship we have with the Creative Father. Each cairn asks us to look at Him through the lens of some idea, topic, or event. “What does this marker say about who we are and where we have been with Him?” Everything has the ability to make us hungry for union with God—NOW.

When we find the cairns or our life, we must sit with them and honor them. We do this by going in to the space inside—into the heart—and seeking an encounter and chance to wrestle with what that cairn represents. What does this thing say about God, about waking up.

We ask ourselves what this marker offers us in order to be in union—NOW. When we have woken up, we should add a stone to the marker. When we have found Him, we should add a stone to the pile.

Every cairn is an image of the Great Cairn. The Great Cairn is our beloved heart-space. Being awake is the multi-dimensional awareness of all phenomena being present throughout all time in that space. The point that is our heart is the endless space of the Divine Milieu. We have the opportunity to meet God at every moment because meaning is layered on meaning throughout all creation. Everywhere we go we have arrived.

***

Under Every Rock

I am looking

under every rock

I find -

for something.

I am not sure

what it is

right yet.

I have been told

that I will

know it when I

find it,

when I see it,

or smell it

I will know.

I cannot help

but wonder

if I have forgotten

I am searching.

Turning rocks

is just

such fun.

What is it I am doing

again? Am I

looking for rocks,

or somehow looking

for myself?

***

It is remarkable how each religion finds its own way to image the heart and the journey within. We all build places to mark off encounters and wrestlings with God. Everyone has them.

Monks’ cells carved in sandstone and limestone cliffs, stone huts built along glorious pilgrimage vistas, cairns piled high to mark off the sacred, shrines along roads and trails, large stones in a field, they are all markers of the heart. “Something of importance happened here”, the cairns call out. “Stop and remember what these rocks stand for”, the rocks cry out.

All of these places shadow the interior space we go to when we pray. All of them give us an outward nexus from which to make an inward journey. All of them remind us that we know our ultimate solace comes from meeting the One in the silence of the heart. The outward “holy places” of the religious person are really emblems of the heart. They mark a place on earth where someone found the path in; they show everyone that “It happened here. I found God here.” It may be a garden, it may be statue, it may be a cross by the side of the road; whatever it is, it offers us hope.

We all need a place outside of us that images our inner heart. We need to create places that sign for us to go within—NOW. We need spaces that are caves of the heart. We do not need to wait for them. We have them now. They are this moment. They are this place. We need to learn how to feel confident enough to sanctify this moment in time and this place in space.

There is a need to show everyone that holy occurrences happen in space and time. There is a need to show ourselves. We mark them to help us remember that time and space were altered by a meeting and wrestling with God; that we were changed in a meeting and wrestling with God. We mark them to remind us that union is possible. Cairns at holy places scream out, “Someone opened up to God here. You can, too.” Our hearts groan with this longing intent. Our lives clamber toward this hope of meeting.

The landscape all around a cairn—all around a heart—is changed by the Presence of meeting and wrestling with God. Moses’ face shone with the Glory of the LORD. People were healed in the Presence of Jesus. We are born-again when we engage God.

Sometimes the words we share in this discussion will feel forced or just a bit beyond comprehension. What we are trying to work with here in this text is the notion that all space and time come to bear on this moment and this place. We can unite with God here and now. That takes bringing together both the local and the non-local. Of course this will be tough. We will have to sustain the power of juxtaposed positions and images. Bear with it. Treat it as poetry and let the words roll over you, creating an impression that is itself the meaning.

***

When we are talking about caves, chapels, cells, prayer rooms, and cairns we are talking about sacred space, “walled off” or “set aside areas.” They are markers in space and time. These are sometimes called “hermetic spaces.”

Hermes shows up over and over again in these types of discussions because of his birth in a cave and his re-swaddling of himself as an infant (after he stole his brother’s cattle). The cave and swaddling are walled-in notions. It is that sense of seclusion (cave-like) and surrounded-ness (swaddled-ness) that keeps Hermes name close to these settings. He is seen as the “god” of the interior and interior quest.

The heart is an Hermetic space. It is the interior place for meeting and wrestling with God. The heart is a walled garden, a cave fed by an underground spring, a hollow in the side of a rock, and the shade of a sheltering pine. Set apart, it is Holy unto the LORD. It is a comfort object from before all time.

***

Hatefulness tends to produce hatefulness, love tends to produce love, and humility tends to produce humility. How can we transform the places we go to for prayer? How can we transform the inner chapel of our hearts—change them to reflect the Glory of the One? How can we mark the landscape of our lives with the wrestling encounters we have with the Uncircumscribable One from all ages? How may we discern the meaning of the landscape?

My hope is that we will begin to look at the markers of meaning in our lives and notice how we store that meaning in our heart. My hope is that we will begin to see that heart as a multi-dimensional universe within us that is truly already the Divine Milieu. That we will begin to use the meaning all around us to wake up to what IS.

My pragmatic desire is that we will look at places we set aside as holy. We will reconstruct our prayer life and the shape of our interior world. We will recognize the impact things have on us and discriminate toward health. In addition, that ultimately we will WAKE UP to the presence of God in us.

Our journey in this book will be more like an amble or a wandering. We will hop from pillar to post looking for meaning and attempting to infuse things with meaning. We will look at our practices and the practices of those from our shared human past. We will begin to notice that there is a hidden depth to how we live—one that reveals we live in layers or dimensions, not simple and flat lines.

Whether the spaces of prayer are inside or outside they reveal and transform who we are and who we are becoming. Join me as we amble among the markers and choose to transform space and time by hallowing our prayer closet within. The prayer closet of our heart.

Let us find the things that we have left as markers all through our lives and those markers that have been left by others in the life of the Church. Let us learn to read what they have to tell us about where we have been, where we are, and where we are going. Let us become changed into the very image and likeness of the One who has called us from the beginning of time and space. Let us also leave holy markers for all who come after.