Only One Love

(August reflections are all short pieces from Travelling Light)

 We forget that the world is the body of God, that, as the poets remember, eternity is caught in the most complex moment, infinity in a passing gesture and divinity in every aspiration of the human heart. Without the fact of the enfleshing of the Word, no poet or mystic could hold, with absolute certainty, what Hebrew authors glimpsed- that every drop of water, every grain of sand, every leaf, every feeling were all small sacraments of divinity. So important and holy is the ‘being’ of things, the ‘isness’ of things, the life-breath of any creature, the heartbeat of the tiniest insect, that to become one with it, is to become one with God. Once again, we listen to the Mystic author of The Cloud of Unknowing, ‘ If you look at God in the perspective of eternity,’ he writes, ‘there is no name you can give him, nor is there any experience or understanding which is more fitting than that which is contained in the blind and lovely beholding of the word ‘is’ .

Above all when we struggle to love as truly as we can, then, especially, is when we are held in mystery. (Mystery being the context and unfathomable backdrop, the infinite horizon to all our human searching and loving). So when we stop thinking distracting thoughts, when we are attentive to the present moment and to all that is going on around us, when we trust in the now, letting go of everything that is not in the now, then to my mind we are sensing the liberating reality of God.

The Mystics describe this kind of attention as something like the way people in love gaze in silence at each other, and are privileged to enter some reserved inner sanctum out of bounds to all but the lover. When people are gifted with this mutual loving, there is a deeper mystery present. The revelation of the incarnation is not about a third element in this relationship, as though God’s love was another dimension to be included in the equation. Any form of human loving is impossible without God; The more purified and authentic it is, the more completely it can be identified with divine love. ‘In relationship’, Steven and Andrea Levin teach in their new tape set, ‘To Love and be Loved’  lies all the work that needs to be done on the spiritual path; the confrontation with our grief, fear, distrust and judgement. In the deepest spiritual practises, one discovers that pure awareness and pure love are indistinguishable.

It was, after all, in Jesus’ sensitive human presence to his relationships, in his attentive struggles with them, in all his human lovableness, in his attractiveness as a deeply caring human being, that God’s essence was revealed and that the church was founded. It was in the warmth of his smile, the look in his eyes, the magnetism of his awareness of people’s guilt and fear, that God wished to be accessible to the world. For the Christian there is no other way to worship the sacred human heart of God.

Given our human condition, in time and space, and given God’s assumption of that finite condition as the full and sufficient medium of continuing revelation, there is nothing anymore concerning the reality of God in Jesus that lies outside of humanity, of human experience, of the totality of creation.

To simply be is to be able, like the hub of a wheel to hold all the vibrant spokes together.

To simply be is to be attentive enough to the shifting surfaces of life, like a human spirit level, bringing into right relationship what is out of true.

To simply be is to be attuned enough to one’s inner, divine harmony, so as to be a tuning fork, bringing discordant voices into true pitch.

To simply be is to be a map, a compass for those who are lost.

The purpose of silence in our lives, of nonverbal ways of being present to ourselves and to others, is simply and precisely to heighten our awareness of the subtleties of life- those nooks and crannies in the labyrinths of our daily work and play-those nooks and crannies in which God is waiting to be found.

To simply be above all is to be in our bodies. Because of God’s initial desire, fall or no fall, as we saw, to assume created humanity, to become formed into flesh, God’s pure being is now available in human bodies. It seems as though there is a divine obsession with the physical. From God’s delight in assuming the small body of a baby, to Jesus’s amazing plan to become the very flesh and bone of human beings, through our eating drinking of his own body in the medium of bread and wine, it is no wonder that, in a more enlightened orthodoxy, the body and all its spiritual and sexual powers are is seen as a very Tabernacle of divinity.

(Travelling Light pp 191,192)