The Grace of Now

Like a bird on a wire:

The beloved Leonard Cohen has sung about the freedom he had sought for all his life. ‘Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried, in my way, to be free’. So have we all, I suppose – from the baby trying to establish its individuality, separateness and personhood by saying no, to the old woman or man in the nursing home, doing the same thing. Each new day a pure gift from God, a bonus of newness. Every experience of my senses, now a deeper experience. The freedom of being unframed at last, of seeing and sensing without borders, a unique opportunity for pure awareness, unencumbered by the normal pressures, demands, responsibilities, anxieties of the past decades. Maybe this is why I so love Rumi’s lines – ‘Out beyond ideas of right and wrong there’s a field; I’ll meet you there.’ Without your arrival, dear Tumour, I would never have found, or even glimpsed, that special bright field. I would never be able to truly see, to become untwisted enough in my soul to recognise the divine beauty of my deepest being.

The grace of now:

‘To accept death is to accept God’ wrote Thomas Keating. ‘The Ground of Being’ is how Paul Tillich (d 1965) identified God (Act 17:28) We desire to be in that free place – and we fear it also. Being in that spacious post-death ground of my being will set me free. Yet, as you can see, I run from it. But it is where love is limitless and always unconditional; I can only guess what that experience is like! – so different from our constricted, painfully evolving existence here on Earth of Love and Being. And so, as Anne Marie reminded me in an email this morning of a note she made at one of our last retreats, ‘Live your life to the last beat of your pulse’ and a quote from John O’Donohue, ‘The unlived life is the great tragedy’. Dear Tumour, because of you I can try to live my life as abundantly as possible ‘to the last beat of my pulse’. Not everyone gets that blessed opportunity.

Already sacred:

The Christ of the Incarnation is present whenever and wherever the material and the spiritual co-exist as one. ‘Everything is already christened;’ writes Richard Rohr, ‘all anointing, blessing, declaring and baptising is just to help us get the point!’ The point being that everything and everyone is already anointed and blessed by virtue of its being created in the womb of our fertile Earth, of our ever-birthing Mother-God. We bless water, for instance, not to make it holier; the very source of life and evolution, the most beautiful of divine creations, how can we make it any holier? Similarly with all the sacraments. According to theologian Karl Rahner celebrating the sacraments adds nothing to human nature and its qualities – they reveal and witness to the holiness and divinity of what always and already is at the heart of our lives. Like the bread at the Eucharist, the water at Baptism, human love at Marriage. Like Spring to the renewing of the land and of our hearts after the winter of waiting; like the energy and delight in the body and eyes of the growing baby; like the universal healing that floods through everything, bringing a harvest of fullness to fields and limbs and stars. We desperately need all these rites, rituals, sacraments, sacramentals, blessings because, in our finiteness, weakness and ignorance we keep forgetting (or maybe were never told about the real redeeming meaning of) Incarnation – that all is always and already graced beyond measure, that my tumour is to me what his cross was to Jesus, no more no less.

(Reflection from Section 78 of Dancing to my Death)