Saturday 24 March 2007

Groundwork

Preparing the ground must come first.

When we are ready, and God leads us to where He most needs us to be, we can hope to put our hand to the plough.
But first we must prepare ourselves.
We will be unable to begin, unable even to find the ploughshare, let alone a source of power with which to make use of it, until we are awakened to the guidance of the Spirit of God within us.
The ground within ourselves must be worked, and for this there is no plough, no oxen, no harrow.
These will be formed from the person still buried deep beneath our worldly outer selves.
Before we can even begin, we have to dig deep into ourselves; uprooting thickets of thorn, tearing out tussocks of coarse grass, clearing away the rocks, the brambles and matted weeds to expose our fertile but hidden soil.
Only then can our inner ground itself be turned; and all this must be done with nothing but our bare hands.

We are as Adam.
“By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground as you were taken from it.” (Genesis 3:19)
We were all born in Eden, and through Adam’s fall away from God, we all shrank away from the awareness of His presence.
Paradise was lost; a forbidden awareness gained.
This is where our striving begins; with the climb back into the presence of God: leaving the hiding place into which Adam led us all.

If we have begun to reclaim our basic consciousness of where we were created to be, we can - ‘by the sweat of your face’ – transform our hearts and minds sufficiently for them to become receptive to the word of God.
And God has given us – all of us – regardless of how far we have strayed from Him, the means to find our way back: the means to follow that word.
He made His word a living form that we might use our earthly senses - in the exercise of which we are so well practiced – to hear, to see, to touch, and thus to learn, to turn, and to return to our place with Him.
Jesus was born into the world; God’s Word was made flesh.

Our gradual awakening: our building and dwelling on the nebulous awareness within until it begins to fan the deeply buried ember of faith, is the unravelling, the laying bare, and the making good which readies us for following Him.

“Clear the ground that lies neglected, do not sow among thorns.” (Jeremiah4:3)
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Friday 23 March 2007

Called by name

It is our developing awareness of God that generates our need for recognition.

It is growth in that awareness which prevents our stagnation in a purely self-centred desire.
Living in the presence of God brings a metamorphosis from the self, and a coalescing of our needs into one all-encompassing longing: - a longing to take our place within the stream of love.
To give as well as to receive, to console and to be consoled, to heal and be healed, to carry and be carried; to take our place on the path that leads up through the mists, into the stillness and the high mountains where we shall be taken to the very edge, and, ultimately, to within touching distance of our Lord’s cloak, the hem of which wafts past us each time we turn to face Him.
From this holy ground we shall carry the seeds of that which we seek, and return to the plains, there to cultivate the soil within ourselves until ready to plough and to harrow where God wills: - in the places we were destined to be.
And then, at His command: - whatever, wherever, whenever, however, whoever – to sow those seeds.

We live within a lifelong paradox of being infinitely far from Him who is always right here beside us; of being touched by the untouchable; of always finding it a struggle to move closer to that which is our deepest desire; of always failing where we yearn to follow His ways.
Peace can only come as a product of the gentle flow of God’s love through us, and it is in search of our place within that eternal stream that we become disciples: we become His followers, and we join with the group of travellers along the way to bring awareness of His proximity and His touch to others.
In doing so, we avail ourselves of a new possibility; our gifted fellow travellers may include one who brings the very insight and touch we need for the continuation of our own journey.

We have been drawn towards Him.
We may not have heard directly, but we were called; He called us and we responded, and our response has made the call clearer to us.
“You have called me by my name. I hear you Lord.”
An awareness of having become one of The Found has brought its own gifts. These will vary according to our needs and to their relevance to the person we are discovering within ourselves, but one gift will be common to us all: -
we are now also among The Named. (4th & 6th January posts)

We could so easily rest in this place.

If, in any way, we have travelled an appreciable distance, whether in our faith, our relationships, our trust, our forgiveness, our repentance, - in whatever way may be relevant to our own personal spiritual and temporal lives - the change may be great enough to have already eased a considerable burden, or to have raised a comparatively trouble-free but featureless life to a new-found brightness and potential vitality.
We have not been called simply to give us the recognition we need: to enable us to hear the words “I know you”, and to tuck them away somewhere as though they were a membership card or a season ticket; something we can take out and listen to again whenever we like: something downloaded onto our MP3 player, or maybe even used as a ring tone on our mobile.
No, we are called to follow Him.
We are called to be His disciples, and to be ready to hear Him whenever He calls us to hear, to see, to do, to stay, or to go; whenever he calls on us to love.

If we do not feel we have moved from where we started, we can be assured that our very interest in progressing in our faith is enough to work within us. We each have our own paths to follow within the journey we are all called upon to make, and much may need to be unravelled, laid bare or made good.
This may take time, but our worth is not measured in quick results.
It is realized only in becoming the person we were born to be, and thus in doing whatever God may intend to ask of us.
We have only to follow and to be open to the working of the Spirit of God within us.
If my whole place in this world is centred on being able to respond correctly to God’s word for only one moment, in another forty years time, I can only hope and pray that when the time comes I shall be in the right place, fully prepared, and ready to respond according to His will.

If our journey so far has brought any form of loss, of desolation, or of misery, hold fast; believe in Him.
Once again, Lay it all before Him.
Share the truth with Him, that He may share His truth with you.
Make every sorrow and every thought a prayer.
Trust that He alone knows what is needed for us, and from us.
The unravelling may well be very painful. Perseverance will prove it to also be very fruitful.
I say this in the knowledge that my own experience of being emptied and refilled formed the bedrock of my present sense of peace and overflowing, however dimmed and restricted that sense may still be.

… ‘Samuel! Samuel!’
Samuel answered, ‘Speak, Lord; for your servant is listening.’ (1 Samuel 3:10)
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Thursday 22 March 2007

Recognition (1)

Within each of us there is a deep need for recognition.

This is not the desire for publicity or adulation, congratulation or promotion, that, at times, can clearly be seen flowing through individual lives, but for the simple recognition of our inner selves: that aspect of our presence which, despite the depth of our wishes, remains carefully hidden from most, if not all the people we meet; perhaps even from ourselves until our awareness was awakened.
From the most extrovert to the most introvert, from the flamboyant, exuberant and dominant, to the reserved, reticent and subservient, the need is the same.

It is a longing that constantly buoys us up on the tide of confusion and inadequacy that carries us beyond the edges of our realization. No sooner have we adjusted to some small change of position, than we find ourselves drawn into further confusion and doubt, and thus towards another edge; yet we are still upheld.
With little or no comprehension of what is happening, our very longing seems to hold us in a form of safety.
This underlying need, which aches its way through our mixed emotions, is an irrepressible inner response to something we are still unable to define, but in which we are now unable to disbelieve.
Something has gripped us, and its presence – though not preventing them - overrides all our fears.
It sketches within us a greater realization, a growing fullness, and a promise of fulfilment and completion.

Our longing is both need and desire.
We desire to be known for who we are, even before we have begun to realize that knowledge for ourselves.
The depth of our need is constant, but our recognition of it – if we will but set out on our journey - grows throughout our lives.
The deeply buried ember that became part of us as a result of the creative spark at our conception, glows increasingly as we discover who we truly are, and who we have been created to be.

Embedded within creation itself, and thereby within each one of us, is the basic awareness that we have been considering: the awareness of something more, something other, something greater. An awareness of a presence; a reclaimed consciousness which is our instinctive response to the universal love we (far too dismissively) call God.

We long to be loved, and we long to love the source of that love.
We long for love to flow endlessly to us and into us, but this will never bring true peace unless our desire for recognition is satisfied. That recognition lies in the blending of the love which flows to us and into us, with the longing for love to flow from us and out of us.
The profound reality of love, and of the peace which it offers, is that it is never restricted, it is never confined, and it is never still.
It lives and it moves.

It lives within us only when we fully understand the nature of our desire: when we long, not for love to flow to us or from us, but to flow endlessly through us. A reciprocal process allowing our love to be constantly renewed and returned to its Creator, while His love overflows from within us to the needs of the world at large.
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Saturday 10 March 2007

Always beyond


We can only see where we are when it has become where we were: when we have moved on.
It is only in looking back to where we have been that we can see that place clearly.
While there, we were unable to imagine another place further on, as we were already somewhere we could not previously have imagined. It is not that we try to imagine and fail, it is that the very idea that there may be more, does not, and cannot occur to us.

When we are already taken out of and beyond ourselves, placed outside the limits of our experience and understanding, we have no landmarks by which we are able to judge our position; no recognizable footholds or handholds we can use to hold firm while we attempt to judge our direction of travel, and without which we can find nothing on which to build any sense of security.
We struggle to find our bearings within the newness that has enveloped us.

Where are we? What is this place? And what is our place within this place?
All we can be sure of is that we have moved in relation to our past.
Our present will always stand upon the foundation of our past, but in our spiritual journey all the knowledge, awareness and realization that had, until now, been our present, can seem lost. As with our temporal life, our past is the groundwork for our present, but there is no neatly recorded progression to our present position: no recognizable pattern of steps that has led us here; no memory of the last part of our journey. All that we had been - the safety of our presence within a present perceptibly formed from our past - has fallen away to become part of that past.

Stepping out in faith will bring us to the edge, but sometimes, just when we dare to open our eyes to see how close we have come, we find there is no edge: we have been taken beyond it. Without any of the half-anticipated emotions, we have been placed in this entirely new place. The edge we had been moving towards is somewhere behind us; we never arrived there: we never saw it. It is as though it had never existed.
We may be in no position to learn it at this time, but this speaks of an important truth: - the edge itself is of no real consequence.
What we seek is always beyond.

There is a possibility that every stage of our journey towards God will feel like this, that each move forward will bring an (at first) incomprehensible change to our comfortable and accustomed level of awareness. The change may even be so great that we believe ourselves to have arrived at our destination. We have not, and the experience and feeling of this new awareness, whether leading us towards an apparent misery or ecstasy, is not one in which to linger, and still less one to hope for.
Without doubt the experience will be undeniable, but it is merely a confusion born of our utter ignorance of that which we approach.

Though our movement, in relation to the distance between present knowledge and full understanding, is as climbing a tree to get a closer view of the moon, the change may seem immense, and the feelings disconcerting.
We have been accustomed to looking at the moon with our feet planted firmly upon solid ground, but now, perhaps having never climbed a tree before, we find ourselves in the higher branches in the dead of night. We do not know how we got here, and we have no memory of having climbed the tree. We are clinging on desperately, not daring to look down and hardly daring to look up at the very thing which drew us here in the first place. The whole experience is entirely new to us.
If we had been able to imagine ourselves in this place, (which we were not), we could only have estimated the experience by looking up at the trees; we could not have anticipated the reality of clinging to a branch high above the ground, in the dark, on a wild and windy night. We had not anticipated the wind, and had no way of understanding how much these high branches would move with it.
We are swept and deeply stirred by the breath of the Holy Spirit;
- and for all the disruption, the moon looks no closer.

In this are pointers to two more important truths: - each small approach may bring wholly unimagined changes to our awareness and understanding, and, despite this seemingly large jump and rapid advance, the possibility of seeing God face to face remains infinitely far from us.

At best the experience will distract and delay us; at worst it will bring our advance to a permanent standstill.
Just as the first steps are always taken before we consciously take the first step, so may we be halted long before our consciousness grasps the fact that we have stopped.
This pattern may be repeated several times, possibly many times, before we suspect that we have not in fact arrived, and that we shall not have done so when the next change occurs, and nor the one after that.

We must walk towards a realization of our comparative insignificance, and a growing understanding of just how little is the distance we have come when revealed against the void that still lies between us and our place with God.
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“it is impossible to fathom the marvels of the Lord.
When someone finishes he is only beginning,
and when he stops he is as puzzled as ever.”
(Ecclesiasticus (Si) 18:6-7)
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Sunday 4 March 2007

Beyond understanding

Twice in recent times, immediate neighbours and friends have experienced the devastation of arriving suddenly and unavoidably at one of the life-moments all parents hope never to experience; they have been brought to the very edge.
They have been confronted with a long free-fall into an abyss where all understanding, all peace, and all stability are shredded into an ungraspable and meaningless haze: a mist that thickens as certainly and as unstoppably as water finding its own level, until their very existence has become as a void within a drained and crumpled shell.
A muffled and slow-motion quality overlays the inexplicable continuation of day-to-day activity in the world around them.
How can people be carrying on as though nothing has happened?
Surely the whole world knows and everyone else is hurting too?
How desperately alone we can feel in our grief.

There is no going back.

They have found themselves in a new place from which there is no return.
Little did they suspect that the desert experience of Lent would become so very real.
Little did I that I would be brought back to thoughts of such edges so soon, or in such a way. (1st January post)
Both have lost a son.

Marlene and Roy continue to endure their loss through the sudden and (at first) inexplicable death of their son Darren.

Theresa and Peter, whose son Andrew died two weeks ago, are still lost in that abyss.
While the world looks like a wilderness to them, the long and slow process of healing will seem unlikely to begin; but even within their pain I see the trust - and even joy - born of faith, refusing to be beaten down and trampled in the mire of their grief.
Their awareness of God’s presence is what makes the difference; the smallest touch prevents their loss sliding into total desolation and despair.

From conception to death these sons’ lives have been lived.
They came to the world through their parents’ love and have now returned to the source of their being.
With every birth and every death we are reminded of the eternal links between the two, and the following words of Carlo Carretto express the wonder that is life in a new-born child, and also the root cause of the grief felt by parents whose expectation would have been to predecease their children.

'If we wished to sum up the relationship that should exist between man and God, if we wished to give as exact an example as possible of the trust on which the peace of those who live in the mystery of God depends, we could not do better than point to the infant sleeping in the strong arms of its mother, close to the womb of its being, safe under the watchful eye of the person who gave him his existence and who thought of him before he ever was.’ ...

'When a father gazes into the innocent eyes of his son, he will, if he looks carefully, see the mystery of the infinite, of the unfathomable, of the ungraspable. He will feel that even though this little body belongs to him, because it was born from his blood, it comes from a distant world, from infinity, from God. God created him at the very moment when man desired a son, and in the unity of love saw him as it were issuing forth from the chaos of non-being. For an instant man has shared in God's creative joy and has touched the infinite.' ... ( from 'Love is for Living' )

May they, and all departed sons and daughters rest in peace.
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About Me

Who I am should be, and should remain, of little consequence to you. Who you are is what matters; who you are meant to be is what should matter most to you. In coming closer to my own true self, I have gradually been filled with the near inexpressible: I have simply become "brim full", and my words to you are drawn from those uttered within myself, as part of an undeniable overflowing that brings a smile to my every dusk, and to my every new dawn.
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