Читать книгу Bridges, Paths, and Waters; Dirt, Sky, and Mountains - N. Thomas Johnson-Medland - Страница 7

There is something haunting about water. There is a power in her to lure and lull us. It is not just her power to drown or destroy. She holds silent things within. There is a lot of silence in her, and a lot of aged knowledge from seeing and passing all that has been. That is her wisdom. That silence is her power.

Rivers have seen passages of time that we can only guess at or imagine. Rivers wrap themselves over the planet in space, but have existed like this over time.

Her wisdom spans through time and is held treasure within her very being. Perhaps she can answer the thunderous questions of the Holy One that were hurled at Job in chapter 38 (verses 19–33). Questions about where the abode of light is hidden. Questions about where the rain and the hail come from and who parents them. Questions that challenge our small understanding and insignificant status on this earth-place we call home.

The water of the rivers, streams, and oceans may have answers to these questions that we have no right guessing at in our short life spans. Perhaps all that they have seen and witnessed has been absorbed into each cell of every drop of the earth’s waters. There is something about water that makes us calm. Water exudes a peace that can only come from wisdom. It may be that this peace comes from the wisdom of knowing that everything shall pass, that everything will move on and become something else.

I believe that bridges and paths hold much of the same. There is a silence in them, too. There is an aged knowledge and wisdom in them that is built up over time and space, too. It is the same with dirt, and sky, and mountains. Their silence harbors testimony to the mysteries of creation and the beauty of created and dappled things. They own a deepness that may not be named, but may clearly be felt.

I have often pondered beside these features in our world; and pondered about them. I have sat for hours on end staring at them and surrounding their essence with my “self”; and surrounding my “self” with them. I have put my feeling into them and pulled them back into me. I have reached out to feel what it is to be a bridge, a path, water, dirt, sky, or a mountain. I have imagined their place in my life—in our lives.

There is an overarching depth to their individual presence. There is an abysmal stillness to them that calls us out of ourselves into the open. Hidden in the apparent motionlessness of each is the ability to move things. Whether carrying things on her back, along her banks, like a river or the enabling of simple passage—one side to another—one place to another like a path or bridge, the object that seems so sure and immovable facilitates movement.

Things that appear to be still like this are in constant motion. It may only be the motion of slow and steady growth, or of the terrestrial turning on an axis, but things that appear still are moving. T.S. Eliot writes about it as a still point that exists at the center of things that are turning. Though this appears to be the other side of the conversation about all things moving, it brings us around full circle. There is stillness in motion and motion in stillness.

This conundrum drawls out my interest. These images elicit my adoration and awe. A place of such motion is a place of utter stillness. It is odd; stillness and motion being in the same place at once. As with other conundrums—such as an echoing silence or a grand humility—time and space are spanned with little care for resolution and closure.

With dirt, sky, and mountain the riddle is no different. Each appears to be stoically still and immovable, but the changes of weather and time move them all about. The seasons move across and through them and alter their shape and place—removing any true sense of stillness. Time and space converge and transport all things beyond what they merely appear to be. That is the depth all things have. Perhaps one of the mysteries of creation itself is that things are more than they appear.

There is another sense that draws me out. It is the sense that these things mirror or image deeper more majestic truths in us. They speak to us about who we are. Paths and waters start at a point far away; a place we cannot see. They move away from that unseen place and move closer to us—to our seen place.

Moving from the invisible to the visible is a pattern I notice in my interior life and the lives of those I know. Feelings and responses emerge from within us and we are not able to trace their winding banks to discover their origins—not at first. As time goes on and we trace their path we may find out just where they come from and what gives them birth.

The dirt, sky, and mountains are no different. They exhibit this characteristic depth. They mirror our lives in some way. When we look at these wonders of God, a line is drawn out from our eyes to a point of observation in one of these—our sisters of creation. We connect with things outside of ourselves. We sense an “us-ness” to creation and at the same time a “not-usness”. It is at once familiar yet unknown.

The process is not complete. Somehow, something in these sisters of creation undauntingly elicits a spark of awe, wonder, and radical amazement. Somehow, in the relationship of discovery we find a familiarity and a respect. The beauty of these objects of nature triggers a line to be drawn back to us. This one goes right into our heart and causes us to shudder meeting our soul on the way. How did that start? Who parented that notion? What is the abode of that thought? Like Job, we stand aghast. Not only do we connect with things, but also we somehow bring them consumptively back into ourselves.

All this talk of where things came from reminds me of our notions about the origins of space and time. Our best guesses and our most ancient myths try to piece together how we have come out of the unseen; how things emerge out of nothingness. It is the “mysterium tremendum” of Rudolf Otto, a great mystery wrapped up in numinous dread, awe, and awe-fullness—something immense coming out of the darkness.

This great mystery is our depths crying out to the depths of all we experience in an attempt to gain some insight from the echoes of our crying. We yearn and long into space and time. We weave tales we imagine to be true from what we think we sense. We desire for meaning and answers in every step and every moment. Nature plays the role of the great object in the of echolocation of being. Perhaps nature looks to us for the same.

We create stories about immense views of beauty and vistas of glory. We try to make sense out of the rapture we feel when in the presence of mystery. All of that “making sense” is of lesser value than the moment of wonder itself. It dilutes wonder. We want to know what we have to offer each other in this relationship called life. We try to put this into words and then unpack the words for slogans we can repeat, small little morsels we can hold onto.

This great mystery begs the questions wrapped around the big bang or the point of creation as an idea. This mystery of things moving out and away from their point of origin, moving toward us and becoming more visible, more solid, creates the question, “If we go back, do we eventually see all things merging into one? Behind that, is the VOID at this place?” Is their a place from which God uttered all things into being, a still small place hidden in time? Is there an alpha point, an omega point?

What if we go back to the moment before the WORD is uttered at creation. Before anything emerges from the darkness, would we see a pre-eternal oneness of all that is? Is there a visible, conjoined something? Or, is the very question ridiculous because there would be no matter created to be visible and so there could be no seeing?

These are the sorts of begging our heart does in the face of grandeur and beauty and silence. When we stand before a mountain, our soul cries out “Tell me about how things are”. As we stand in quiet stillness observing the view, everything in us is in motion for an answer. Everything within is reaching out from us. We call this dense mass of paralyzing feeling “awe”.

Awe is a unique creature. It has sisters. Abraham Joshua Heschel has named her sisters “wonder”, and “radical amazement” (Man is Not Alone—Farrar, Strauss, Giroux). Matthew the Poor called this territory “ecstasy”—from the Greek Fathers’ teachings on “ekstasis” (Orthodox Prayer Life—Saint Vladimir’s Press). However we call it, it is that overwhelming feeling in the heart, that immense presence in the soul that makes us feel so infinitesimally small (dwarfed by the view of the Grand Canyon or the Pleiades) that we feel immense (somehow at one with the Spirit, or all creation). Here is another riddle. Called into smallness, we become grand.

This conundrum of being tiny enough to be everything is exactly what makes awe such a transforming gift of the Spirit. The poems of Rumi are full of this “noticing” of awe that pushes people into union with the Creative Father. Someone may be sitting at a table drinking tea and the note of a flute hits them and awakens them to some hidden mystery. Someone walking down a path may see a rose and all of the sudden—in an instant—everything they have been living “makes sense” for just a second. These flashes of understanding are wrapped-up in awe and they are “Gifts of the Spirit” and they call us into union with the Divine Father.

Nature too lures us into this divine trap. As an instrument of the Spirit, creation beseeches us to look and interact. We start to ponder and to surmise, the next thing we know we are overwhelmed by the depth of creation and snared by the idea that we stand as nothingness against the grand scheme. Mystery subsides and a sense of union and connectedness arises. We feel at one with all God has done. We are lulled into this place against all reason. We are often brought into our heart against our mind’s wishes to figure it all out.

The lives of the mystics were really lives of learning to cope with this awe. The scent of a flower on the wind took our brother Francis of Assisi to great heights of ecstasy in the Merciful One. The sight of a sunrise moved our sister Theresa to feel connected with the Creator. The sound of the rushing falls—over the rocks and into the pools—lured Hildegard into being lost in the great ground of our being.

Awe, ecstasy, wonder, and amazement make us small enough that we can carry the One who is Uncircumscribable. That is the power afoot here. When we become small; then we are large. When we are weak; then we are strong. When we disappear; then HE appears. “All is perishing—except His Face” (the Koran 28:88).

What follows are words and poems that reveal stillness and motion, movement from and toward, passage through space and time. They are descriptions of awe, beauty, wonder, glory, and radical amazement. These can only give a hint at or point toward the actual experience of these things. Once we realize what they are hinting at or pointing to, then we are undone. Once we are onto the scent, or uncover the trail we are no good for this world. We are set loose in an encounter with the Living God of all creation; an encounter in which we lose ourselves to our Beloved.

Capturing the illusory nature of life and its images is as fleeting as grasping at mist, and yet in the activity of trying to make out what is before us and all around us we do find a few laconic and lapidary images that will make themselves into agents of rapture and amazement. We all find a few pearls of wisdom to help carry us through our days on this earth place. We are awakened a few times to the infinite glory by the stuff all around us.

These things, these things that we try to figure out and these things that we invest with meaning; it is these things that we can only hope to discover. If we find any of them in this one lifetime, we are home. We will have arrived. The arduous task of living has these words to offer: “Do not ever lose your ability to be moved by a sunrise. Do not ever stop crying when you see the ocean. Feel the wind blow through you. Be opened up by everything you experience.” We must be always interacting with the stuff of life. We must walk away from these encounters deeper people. These encounters are what nature call us into.

If we find out what it means to be a bridge, or a path, or water, to be dirt, and sky, and mountain, then we find out a piece of our own “selves”. For, surely, we are not only “apart from” the things around us, but we are “a part of” the things around us. All about us are things that inform us about how life is and who we are.

One of the powers of poetry is that it evokes immense and varied images. It evokes ideas and feelings that are vast and seemingly unrelated or conflictual. As we look at these images and discuss them, it is important to recognize that we may come up against things that seem to be broken or in opposition to something else inside of us. We may be left feeling we have not resolved something. Poems may unearth some deep mystery within us. Poems set us on the path of mystery and connection.

Our work with nature and awe should teach us that we are standing in the face of something we cannot wrap our intellect around fully. We feel tiny and unimpressive next to this great scene, vista, or moment, and yet at peace and one.

Contemplating nature can be disturbing. When we unearth unsettling impressions from within ourselves, we are just finding something new that we have not been able to wrap our mind around. We are standing in the presence of a mystery. Some mysteries become revealed. Other mysteries stay mysterious. We are able to express some things that we encounter, other things we can only sense.

There are moments in our lives that we see this same beauty in other people. We sense the depth and the stillness that they exude. We are in awe of someone else. We ourselves may become objects of awe to other people. We see a hungry man offer a cold man his coat. A mother awakens repeatedly to feed her son. A woman holds the hand of her dying sister—and sings. As in nature, we often come upon great vistas in the lives of our brothers and sisters. They are as vast as the dirt, the sky, and the mountains. Rivers are not the only sisters of creation that lull us into union with God.

There is a wonderful quote from Shantideva’s “Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life” (Shambala Press, Boston, MA, 2006) that reads: “May I be a protector for those without one, a guide for all travelers on the way; may I be a bridge, a boat, and a ship for all who wish to cross the water.”

This quote sets out a way in which we may be the still motion for others. We may be an object that helps move folks from one place to the next. We may be a vessel for those who need transport. We may help our own selves move from one place to another on the spiritual journey called life, called faith.

The Father of all may call us to move others along the way. We must allow ourselves the grace of being a depth and stillness that others aspire toward as well. Just as we have already ascribed to the natural world of creation, we ourselves maybe a part of the process of union that others go through.

These terrains we cross, they are always changing. At one place in life, we may ford the rivers of pride; at another we may cross on the bridge of desire. Some days we cross the desert of apathy, others we search for the path of kindness that climbs through the hills. Others journey the same as we do. They encounter the same terrain. They look to us for meaning and understanding. We ourselves may be the object of the echolocation of being for another.

We ourselves—as Shantideva proclaims for us—can be vehicles to support others through their journey. As caring people who lend aid to other travelers throughout life we must remain flexible, available, and open. If we do not we may not be of service. We must be pliable enough to hearken unto the voice of the Spirit and compassionate enough to be the exact vehicle needed—these are tricky balances to maintain.

Can there be anything more useless and more “in your face” than the wrong vehicle in the wrong place. If a person needs a path across a hot desert, being a boat will be of no use. If a log bridge is needed to cross a stream, being a path will be useless. What sense does it make to see a rowboat in the middle of the desert? What good is the path if you are trying to get across the stream to the other bank?

Being compassionate requires suppleness and discernment. We must ferret out the need and be able to adapt our “selves” to the task at hand. This can only be done with the Spirit; and the terrain of the Spirit, the vehicle of the Spirit is the same: THE HEART. If you are all about living in the Spirit of God, and you are living outside of the HEART, than you probably are not where you think you are. Or, at the very least, you are using the wrong vehicle to get there. The life of the Spirit is the life of the HEART. If you do not know what that means, then the journey has just begun.

Nature becomes our partner not only in the deepening of our own individual selves, but in the process of helping others to deepen as well. We are a all a part of creation. Therefore, the connection to our world is deeper than just self worth. It is about wholeness—the wholeness of all that is.

As we embark on this great journey of faith, focusing in this retreat on the depth and motion of creation in our lives, let us never forget our place in it. We are a part of all that has been brought forth by God. It is not only the ocean that is deep, but our brother is deep as well. It is not only the river that comes toward us from an unseen place, but our feelings as well. It is not only the earth that shifts and slides as an escarpment is being born, but our hearts as well. We are, as John Donne proclaimed, pieces of the whole.

May the poems and the exercises that follow lead you to a place of wonder, and awe, and radical amazement—a place that lulls you into union with our Imaginative Father and all that He has summoned from His WORD.