To Be is Blessed

(August reflections are all short pieces from Travelling Light)

 To be truly present, however, requires persistent awareness, attention, focus, the ability to stay with, to wonder at, to be lost in, to wake up to the holiness of the present moment. That is the reason for the prayer of quiet, for contemplation, for meditation for the mystical path. That is the reason for celebrating the sacraments, with all those natural elements that remind us of God’s energy already flowing through all things. Without a deep awareness of God’s healing presence in every aspect of time and space, from the beginning to the end, and in every split-second and split-atom in between, our celebration of baptism and Eucharist can never be authentically sacramental.

In these pages I only want to indicate, with large brush strokes, the fundamental principles for holding that to simply be is enough. We can say such a thing with faith and courage because, working backwards and forwards from the revelation that was Jesus, we now know that God is always offering God’s own self in every dimension of life. Every created moment and thing is a blessed sacrament of God’s real presence. Whenever, for instance, we experience the heartfelt feelings of anyone, we are experiencing God. Whenever we truly love anybody, we save that person forever, because our love is divine. When we forgive somebody, that person is forgiven by God.

This is so amazing that most people dismiss it as untrue. It is too simple and too profound. To love anyone truly is to be another Christ, to be God incarnate. There are not two loves. There is not another higher level of being. To believe otherwise is to be guilty of dualism, to deny the meaning of incarnation. We want signs and wonders, oblivious to the miracles around us every day. We want priests and scapegoats as ‘in-betweens’, between ourselves and God, and between ourselves and sin, and between ourselves and ourselves.

We would rather live in a two-tier world, misunderstanding the whole point of incarnation, pandering to magic and superstition in our dualistic devotions, seeing ordinary life as merely secular and always hankering after the sacred people, sacred places and sacred things in the fruitless search for what is already lying in abundance at our fingertips.

But not so with the 14th century Persian poet Hafiz:

 One regret dear world

That I am determined not to have

When I am lying on my deathbed

 Is that I did not kiss you enough.

 

(Travelling Light pp 189,190)